Water losses used to cost Australia's South East Water US$12 million and reading water meters cost millions more. Not anymore: Going smart is great for business.
By Jiang Yilin
Australian water utility company South East Water (SEW) manages 720,000 water meters, operates 25,000 km of pipeline, and serves 1.7 million people in the south-east area of Melbourne, one of the world’s most expensive cities. SEW’s main areas of business are residential and commercial water supply, domestic and industrial wastewater treatment, and water quality and environmental monitoring.
South East Water has traditionally read meters manually, but Melbourne’s labor shortage means the cost of doing so is astronomical. To lower costs, SEW only takes readings once every three months and combines bills for both feed water and sewage water. This results in a three-month gap between meter readings and payment. In addition, SEW contends with an annual loss of 12 million tons of water, valued at more than AU$30 million (US$23.3 million), due to pipeline leaks – a great waste of resources as well as a huge financial loss.
SEW started looking into smart water solutions in 2013 with two aims in mind: one, improve its own production methods and thus efficiency to provide greater reliability and value to customers; and two, provide technical services and solutions through its subsidiary IoTA to become a leader in smart water. It’s already succeeding in the latter aim, with the highly profitable IoTA product OneBox, a smart controller for sewage and drainage, already having been exported to other countries, including New Zealand.
For its smart meters, SEW considered both LoRa and Sigfox as access methods. However, field test data for these unlicensed spectrum solutions wasn’t promising. Neither could cover network blind spots nor avoid unpredictable interference, which is unacceptable for public utilities where service reliability must be guaranteed. Thus, SEW chose the 3GPP standard NB-IoT.
In mid-2015, SEW and Huawei started to discuss collaboration in the smart water field. Talks led to SEW, Huawei, and a water meter manufacturer forming a partnership to push into the smart water market. Huawei and SEW signed an agreement in May 2016, after Huawei demonstrated smart water meter prototypes from its industry partners, Sanchuan and Huizhong. On December 22, 2016, the partners carried out the world's E2E commercial testing on outdoor smart water meters.
SEW and Huawei have already completed development of the E2E smart water solution, deploying NB-IoT smart water meters on a small scale and determining the solution’s architecture by trial-and-error. SEW has taken on responsibility for building its own terminals and upper-layer IoT application suite, while SEW’s carrier partner will provide connection and device management capabilities. This layered architecture will enable SEW to control critical control points in the smart water solution, and mean that it can be replicated and developed in the future. According to SEW's CFO, "From the production of water meter data to the data reaching South East Water's data center via the carrier's network, we’re willing to pay several Australian dollars per meter for this process every year."
To make up for the shortfall in local capabilities, Huawei brought in its Chinese device partners Huizhong and Sanchuan to develop the specifications for the smart water meter. The main components comprise four different sensors: a flow sensor to measure water volume; a water temperature sensor and a water pressure sensor so that high and low temperatures and pressures can be monitored and adjusted; and a vibration sensor designed by SEW to monitor pipeline leaks to facilitate fast repairs. Huawei also worked with the device partners to provide technical support for integrating an NB-IoT module into the device, optimizing the water meter RF, and performing E2E verification tests at Huawei OpenLab.
SEW and Huawei's collaboration in the smart water meter arena encouraged the local operator to build an NB-IoT network. The network now covers the entire SEW service area.
Operators now realize that unlike other machine-to-machine services, the public utilities sector requires them to provide device management capabilities as well as connection management services to avoid future problems. Once meters are connected to the network, they can remain in place for up to a decade, and it’s vital that operators can sense their status for monitoring and management during network upgrades.
Huawei's IoT platform enables the quick integration of smart water meters, status monitoring, data reporting, and fault demarcation, to help operators quickly locate problems and solve the O&M challenges of managing massive numbers of IoT devices.
SEW is committed to becoming a leader in the smart water industry, and building capabilities in enterprise IoT suites is a key part of that. As the deployment of smart meters accelerates, the data processing, storage, and analysis capabilities of the IoT suite will be refined to lay a firm foundation for future technological development.
SEW is carrying out organizational restructuring in response to the new production methods, business models, and O&M challenges that have arisen in the smart water era.
Accurate user data on water consumption will enable on-demand production, putting an end to waste through imprecise delivery. SEW will be able to implement tiered pricing, which will facilitate revenue growth and the conservation of water resources. Water companies will no longer be able to carry out O&M alone. SEW is still investigating integrated delivery methods, and hopes to find a suitable integration partner to provide a one-stop shop for meter installation, maintenance, connection management, and device management.
Pushed by the smart water industry, telcos are also starting to embrace change. At the same time as speeding up the deployment of NB-IoT networks, they’re also building connection management and device management capabilities for massive numbers of devices and setting up unified IoT platforms to meet different industries' future demands for data processing, storage, and analysis.
During this process, Huawei will promote open cooperation and strive to enable the digital transformation of carriers and industry customers.
