in Barcelona
3 to 5 Nov 2026
Telefónica has supplied its OpenGate platform to Madrileña Red de Gas, the gas distributor that serves more than 900,000 supply points across 61 municipalities of the Community of Madrid, enabling remote reading and management of both its industrial and residential meters, according to Spanish business press reports published on 26 October 2026. The system gives the distributor centralised access to consumption data, billing based on actual readings in place of estimates, leak and anomaly alerts, remote supply shut-off and predictive maintenance, and it is described as compatible with multiple meter manufacturers and communication protocols.
Madrileña Red de Gas describes itself as the third-largest gas distribution company in Spain by number of supply points, and it began operating on 1 May 2010 in 38 municipalities before reaching its current footprint, which includes five districts of the city of Madrid.
What the Platform Replaces in a Conventional Metering Chain
The reports state that OpenGate goes beyond a traditional head-end system, the software layer that collects readings from meters and passes them to billing, by adding analytics that calculate the energy values required by the current gas market. A head-end system typically acquires readings and manages communications, whereas the analytics layer described here converts volumetric consumption into energy terms and flags consumption patterns that deviate from a customer’s history.
According to Invertia, via El Español, the platform stores large volumes of data with historical records, which supports the distributor’s regulatory obligations and its reporting to the technical manager of the gas system.
Customer-Side Functions for Residential and Industrial Accounts
For residential customers the system is described as providing automatic, accurate readings without technician visits, alerts on leaks or abnormal use, and access to detailed history through apps and online portals. For industrial and commercial customers the reports describe continuous monitoring intended to optimise processes and lower operating costs, together with anticipation of consumption peaks.
The remote shut-off function is presented as a safety measure, which places the platform inside the distributor’s operational safety procedures as well as its billing process.
Regulatory Background: 5.73 Million Meters Reaching End of Life
The deployment sits against a regulatory backdrop that the Spanish competition and markets regulator CNMC set out in a cost-benefit report of 2 December 2021. Under Order ICT/155/2020, gas meters with a maximum flow of 25 cubic metres per hour or less have a maximum useful life of 20 years, a category that covers almost all domestic meters in Spain.
The CNMC estimated that about 5.73 million gas meters, roughly 72% of the national fleet, would need replacement within about eight years because of their age. It found a positive balance for installing smart meters only in place of meters reaching 20 years of age within that period, and a negative balance for installing them at 100% of consumers within the same eight years.
The regulator also noted that 48% of domestic gas meters in Spain are installed inside homes, which gives remote reading a privacy and access advantage over visits by technicians, and that savings from smart meters depend on consumers being able to use the information supplied to them.
Platform Background and Market Context
OpenGate is an IoT platform that its developer Amplía presents as covering device management, communication monitoring and asset lifecycle management, with smart metering listed among its utility use cases, according to the Sigfox partner listing. The listing describes it as commercially available and compatible with any type of device and most communication technologies.
The supply to Madrileña Red de Gas adds a gas distributor to the utility use cases the platform is marketed for, in a segment where the CNMC’s replacement figure of 5.73 million meters defines the near-term addressable fleet nationwide.
What Will Decide Operating Results
The performance of the system will depend on the share of Madrileña Red de Gas’s more than 900,000 supply points that are fitted with communicating meters and on whether replacement follows the age-based schedule that the CNMC found to have a positive cost-benefit balance, because the platform can only report on meters that are able to transmit.
