As the network of a power distribution company can be very large, maintaining such a network is not only very time-consuming but also very costly, especially when failures occur. A huge amount of effort could be saved by monitoring the substations remotely, which allows, amongst others, to trace failures more efficiently. In this study, such a monitoring network is designed based on WiMAX in ‘Flanders’, Belgium. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study differs from previous studies by combining both coverage and cost calculations. Firstly, the number of base stations needed to cover the considered area is determined. Therefore, link budget calculations are performed to obtain the ranges of the base stations. Secondly, the cost to install and maintain the network is determined using the results of the first step.A cost of approximately 6.5 EUR was found per km2 that needs to be covered. This result is very sensitive to possible changes of the technical parameters, which can lead to cost fluctuations between 33.5% and 3007%. Changes in the cost parameters have, however, less impact on the total cost than the technical parameters. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.