Massive Public LoRaWAN Network Arrives in Florida

Over the next 10 years, the Hillsborough County Water Utility in Central Florida will install close to 80 ,000 AMI smart meters. It's a $20 million project that previously seemed out of reach. It's always been very expensive. It's never been a proposition that I felt or we felt that would pay for itself just on the merit of meter reading. The Util- serves nearly 200 ,000 customers. Every month, as many as 10 % of those customers have a question about their bills. Smart meters can help, but the challenges to deploy them go beyond cost. These water meters sit in pits on the sides of houses, so it's very hard to cover without a lot of really, really dense network coverage. In 2021, the LoRaWAN connectivity provider Senate completed the build-out of a wind network that would span 1600 miles across hillsborough county and the surrounding area it was just what the utility needed to scale its smart water project the laura communications technology and and its communications with the neptune meters has made it just as easy as the old drive-by amr days but with much better technology once a day mario esvito logs off the Neptune 360 platform to analyze water meter data from the 10 ,000 Neptune AMI meters already deployed. Right now we don't have the integration with our building system so this is more for information but it is valuable information that helps with high presumption with any disputes as far as usage. AMI or advanced meter infrastructure enables utilities to collect water usage data in real -time, while AMR, or Advanced Meter Reading, is either a walk -by or a drive -by We chose this particular meter because it has the same function as far as the dials for easy reading, whether it's, you know, one of our people or basically a customer. Now with the cellular, we saw that there were some issues as far as any dead spots. So... the company that we chose actually provided a propagation study where basically showed like hey if you go with us you will definitely get at least like 99 .5 coverage percent so i mean that that spoke volumes what we were really looking for here was a fully hosted cloud product which is what this product the neptune product along with senate communications has offered us as well the uh we have an installer national metering that is is a part of the was a part of the package i mean i can't afford to put up dozens of towers throughout the the county much less train and have personnel to go back out and maintain those those towers it comes as the laura market sees tremendous growth in the states annual report from abi research suggests that laura will lead growth and non-cellular low power a wide area network technology in the next five years. The market is really starting to develop and it's being driven primarily by the benefits of LoRaWAN, which include things like battery life, scalability, low cost devices. So we price based on the number of devices and the number of messages, whereas cellular usually prices based on the number of devices and the amount of devices. of data. Senate has so far established connectivity in 29 states it considers the newly established LoRa network in Central Florida to be the largest and densest LoRaWAN deployment in North America. In the United States you know unlike small countries in Europe where you can put up a bunch of gateways and cover the whole country very cost-effectively obviously this is a massive country and it's very expensive to deploy ubiquitous coverage. for any kind of technology. And so we wanted to create essentially a laboratory that says if you have very, very dense coverage in a large, fast-growing, progressive community, what could you do in terms of unlocking the application community? And so that's how we picked Tampa. Sennem was already working with the Hillsborough County Water Utility when it decided to go in and expand on that network in Tampa. And it relies on- a value-added reseller by the name of Meter Sys to do that. So we've been reaching out through our network to decision makers in Tampa who might be interested in putting devices on using sensors that are part of the lower network. We're working with another one of the water authorities. We're working in the greater Tampa area. We're working with a regional planning council on air quality monitoring. So these are all... kind of proof of concept stages but the whole idea is let's show that we can get you know good projects they're very visible in that community so that people in Tampa and St. Pete see that there's value there. Pilots for those projects typically last about 90 days and Meter Sys believes that it will scale some of those in the second quarter of 2022. In the meantime the Hillsborough County Water Utility will continue to build out its smart meter network and that project could end up being even bigger than initially planned. We've got credit tower meters out there that I know our conservation unit is a division another division of the department is very interested in on seeing how much water is going through these tower meters how much output there is and I've suggested and they're very moving towards putting these meters also at these commercial sites so that they can monitor and analyze the data. need so it has a lot of potential for us for for our balance sheet for looking the the water use and what's build versus unbuild lots of potential there for more coverage on Laura Networks and the value it brings to the IOT market be sure to stick with Curt Insights and if you have a question on this story hit the button below