in Barcelona
3 to 5 Nov 2026
UK tower company Cornerstone Telecommunications Infrastructure Limited and the UK arm of French water group SUEZ said in an announcement reported on 10 November 2026 that Wize radio equipment for collecting water meter data is now installed on 100 Cornerstone mobile sites across the country. Around 180,000 meters are already connected to those sites, and the partners have set an ambition to reach 1 million.
At those figures, each host site serves an average of 1,800 meters, so reaching 1 million at the same density would take about 556 sites. That is still a small share of Cornerstone’s estate of more than 16,500 cell sites, according to ISPreview’s August 2026 report on Cornerstone’s site renewal programme.
Tower Rooftops Replace Street Furniture As The Concentrator Layer
The partners describe the arrangement as a way to host the receiving side of a smart water metering network on existing telecoms infrastructure, so that utilities can obtain consumption data for leak detection and supply management without installing new masts or clusters of repeaters in public spaces.
“Combining strategic telecoms infrastructure with the Wize radio technology means that we can provide incredibly high connectivity performance for our smart metering deployments without having to build new infrastructure in the public environment or have multiple repeaters or smaller cells on public infrastructure,” said David Adams, Commercial Director at SUEZ UK, in the companies’ announcement as reported by Mobile World Live.
The relationship predates this announcement, since SUEZ’s UK smart metering page already lists Cornerstone as its antenna site partner alongside Magdalene, part of Morrison Group, for installation. An opinion piece by Eric Farnier, Technical Committee Executive Officer at the WIZE Alliance, in Water Industry Journal also named Wireless Infrastructure Group and Vodafone as infrastructure and backhaul partners for SUEZ’s UK Wize build.
What Wize Brings To Buried Water Meters
Wize is a low-power wide-area protocol operating in the 169.4 to 169.8125 MHz VHF band, split into six 12.5 kHz channels, and uses the EN 13757-4 mode N physical layer managed by the European standards committee CEN TC294, according to the technical summary of the standard.
The technology traces back to a 169 MHz metering infrastructure SUEZ developed in 2005. The WIZE Alliance was later formed by SUEZ, French gas distributor GRDF and meter maker Sagemcom, and more than 18 million meters are now reported to use the protocol, most of them in GRDF’s Gazpar gas programme.
The lower frequency is the main engineering argument for water, because meters sit in underground boundary boxes under metal or concrete lids, and the WIZE Alliance claims up to 14 dB more link gain than 868 MHz systems. SUEZ says on its UK smart metering services page that it normally achieves 98% property coverage and can detect leaks as small as 1 litre per hour, both figures supplied by the vendor.
A 2022 trial with Northern Ireland Water at Queen’s University Belfast recorded a 100% connectivity rate across 70 meters, with one gateway reaching more than 4.5 miles in a built-up area, according to SUEZ. A Jersey Water trial published in March 2026 reported 98.1% connectivity within 2.5 km of a single concentrator and 96.4% overall, also according to SUEZ.
Southern Water Runs The Largest Wize Water Programme In The UK
The largest public Wize water programme in the UK is at Southern Water, which awarded a £338 million, 20-year contract to upgrade more than one million meters by 2030, with SUEZ as technology partner in the delivery alliance.
Prime contractor SMS, formerly Horizon Water Infrastructure, reported more than 200,000 live smart water meters on Southern Water’s network, communicating over SUEZ’s 169 MHz Wize network and managed through the ON’connect platform. The alliance reports a delivery rate above 1,000 installations per day, measured against a 98% connectivity target.
SUEZ has also run Wize trials with Anglian Water, Severn Trent Water and Scottish Water, according to its UK smart metering page. The company opened a Smart Operations Centre in Maidenhead in 2025 to monitor meter data for UK utilities, as Kurrantly reported at the time.
AMP8 Spending Creates Demand For Every Network Model
The commercial backdrop is the 2025 to 2030 regulatory period in England and Wales, in which Ofwat’s PR24 final determinations allowed £104 billion of expenditure, including about £1.7 billion for 10 million smart meters and £720 million towards a further 17% cut in leakage, according to a summary by The Water Report.
That volume is being split across competing connectivity models. Thames Water’s £180 million contract specifies NB-IoT, while Connexin has secured up to £35 million to extend a LoRaWAN network for water metering. Netmore has placed LoRaWAN gateways on Cellnex UK streetworks monopoles under a 220-site arrangement.
SUEZ itself hedges across technologies, having signed a five-year agreement with Vodafone in October 2023 to combine Wize with NB-IoT in tailored network designs for UK water utilities.
Cornerstone Looks Beyond Mobile Tenancy Revenue
For Cornerstone, water meter concentrators add a non-mobile tenant to a portfolio built for Vodafone and O2 radio equipment since the company was set up as their network-sharing vehicle in 2012.
Its shareholder base has since shifted toward infrastructure investors. GLIL Infrastructure agreed to buy a 16.7% stake from Virgin Media O2 for £360 million, and Equitix later agreed to acquire a further 8.33% for about £186 million. That left Virgin Media O2 with 25.01% and Vantage Towers holding the other half, according to DatacenterDynamics.
Water metering contracts run on long horizons, with SUEZ designing meters for at least 15 years in the ground and Southern Water’s alliance set at 20 years, which gives a tower owner a tenancy profile closer to its mobile operator leases than to short-term IoT deployments.
The pace at which Cornerstone’s hosting grows from 100 sites toward the roughly 556 implied by the 1 million meter target will depend on how many of the 10 million AMP8 meters are specified on Wize rather than NB-IoT or LoRaWAN. The connectivity rates Southern Water records against its 98% target on the live Wize network over the next two years will be the evidence other utilities weigh when they make that choice.
