Smart water

Description of Smart water

Water metering is a kind of application which requires the deployment of millions of devices in the field. The scalability of the application is extremely important. The platform must support the management of large quantities of water meters. Water metering projects usually drive a lot of attention from the market because of the number of connected homes in a country.

Water metering is also a typical application of telemetry. The single data of consume is read from the device on periodic intervals as a basis for consumer billing. Leakages can be also measured in pipelines for the optimization of the water grid. Due to the low quantity of transmitted data the communication of the data is usually done on radio frequencies which allow low consumption of power supply (and therefore the usage of battery since the water meter has perhaps no access to an electric plug). The device meters are based on 3 principals technologies: LORAWAN, NB-IoT and SigFox, all based on radio frequencies outside the licensed spectrum of the traditional telecom operators.

The public entities for water management are of course the natural receptors of this kind of IoT applications. These are projects on the long term with structured bid process for sourcing and are also largely populated in different countries around the globe. This is an intrenational market of standarized solutions. No integration on the point of collection of data is required; you just plug and play the device on the last mile of the public smart grid. Industries are also a major target for the optimization of water consumption and measurement in the production process.