Smart water metering advances in Australia and New Zealand

Expanded smart water metering for Cairns and platform functionality from Itron and a Spark IoT and IOTA partnership bring new solutions for water utilities in Australia and New Zealand.

In a project expansion, Cairns Regional Council in Australia’s far north Queensland is to deploy Itron’s water connectivity and analytics solution, which includes its Intelis wSource NB-IoT water meters alongside the utility’s existing mesh network technology utilising the Itron Temetra digital platform for data collection and data management.

The project, which forms part of the modernisation of Cairns’ water distribution system, builds on the first phase, which has seen an initial deployment of the Intelis ultrasonic water meters and the integrated IoT network solution.

Now, in this second phase, additional Intelis smart water meters are being deployed, which will be managed by the Temetra platform to improve the collection, tracking and management of water data from the endpoints.

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“Water scarcity on the rise globally and adopting a proactive approach to deploying a fully integrated water AMI solution serves as an example for other utilities and municipalities to ensure that their water infrastructure is built to address challenges they will face in the future,” commented Don Reeves, senior vice president of Outcomes at Itron.

The solution will be deployed over the next three years as part of the Council’s water security plan to utilise technology to more quickly identify water leaks and improve the customer experience.

Alongside this project extension, Itron also announced an expansion to the Temetra platform in Australia and New Zealand to include NB-IoT communications, with the aim to provide additional flexibility to water utilities to maximise business value and streamline operations on a single platform.

The NB-IoT is added on top of the existing support for multiple communication protocols, including LoRa and other water advanced metering infrastructure network communications.

Smart water meter management partnership for New Zealand

A new partnership has been formed by New Zealand telco Spark IoT and Iota, a subsidiary of the Victoria water authority South East Water, to bring what they call a new generation of smart water meter management for local councils and water utilities in New Zealand.

The initiative is based on Iota’s Lentic IoT water meter data management and analytics platform coupled with the latest smart water meter technology.

The Lentic platform was developed at South East Water, where 93,000 digital devices are under management with expectation to grow to 1 million over the next five years, and other implementations including a 68,000 smart water meter deployment for the Toowoomba Regional Council in Queensland and a smart water meter rollout for Barwon Water in Victoria.

Daniel Sullivan, CEO of Iota CEO, explains that Lentic was designed by a water utility, with in-built rules and alarms to validate the data and support the many different use cases such as automated customer leak notifications.

“As water authorities deploy large numbers of IoT devices to monitor water and wastewater networks, it is critical to manage the devices and to be able to trust the unprecedented volumes of data coming in. Water is our most precious resource, and the best way we can protect it is to be able to accurately monitor it and the networks in which it flows.”

Updated Lentic figures, May 10