One of the driving forces to promote intelligent water meter is to liberate manual meter reading. Considering from the point of view of water department, if intelligent meters can not meet the characteristics of easy installation, easy deployment and easy use, it will be a little worthwhile to transfer the manpower and financial resources of manual meter reading to deployment and maintenance. For example, although the ad hoc network has fast communication speed and convenient construction, it does not have a unified standard. Each enterprise has its own battle. It is difficult to operate and maintain, high power consumption and high requirements for installation location. Moreover, the interests of water companies are not guaranteed. Once problems or failures occur within the networking enterprises, operation and maintenance can not be carried out, and water companies will bear huge losses. For example, at present, there is only Semtech, the only chip manufacturer in the world. The technical risks are conceivable, not to mention the maintenance.
 

Imagine that if different manufacturers and water meters adopt unified standard agreement and all meters management and business platforms are integrated on one platform, the water meters can not only achieve remote transmission, but also need not consume time and energy in networking, nor need to consider maintenance and technical upgrading, then the water department will be convenient in deployment, maintenance and use. Quite a lot.

 

For the traditional remote water meter, rapid promotion is really difficult to achieve. Whether wired or ad hoc networks, their commercial promotion is greatly limited from installation environment or use environment to operation and maintenance. For example, RS-485 cable mode, communication stability is not disturbed by external interference, but the need for wiring, the use of the scene is greatly limited. This is not appropriate in the old residential area where its own lines have been intricate, and installation in the new residential area will affect its overall beauty, maintenance and upgrading in the future is also very difficult. And wireless networking scheme, although no wiring, but need to build their own stations, time-consuming and money-consuming, maintenance can not be guaranteed, let alone future planning. At the same time, it also needs centralizer purchase fee and communication fee, network maintenance fee, terminal module fee and so on, which is expensive. Besides, GPRS has high power consumption, high cost and communication module can not realize real-time copy. For example, 2G coverage is not wide enough, the signal is very weak in many new residential areas, and the current 2G network is likely to be withdrawn from the network, water companies may be stopped at any time if they use this scheme. Water companies cannot afford the high cost of new residential areas, which are usually covered with 3G/4G signals. Whether using 2G or 3G/4G, the future will face the possibility of withdrawing from the network at any time, and water companies will face huge risks. In addition, LoRa's use of unauthorized frequency bands has no clear direction of technological evolution, and the service life of the scheme is also not guaranteed.

The Water Division is a non-profit organization that is very cost-sensitive. The scale of replacing intelligent water meters is relatively large, and the investment of assets will be very high. Therefore, in order to achieve scale, the price of smart water meters must be reduced. As mentioned above, both networking and GPRS require high investment.

Secondly, water enterprises have an urgent need for intelligent water, but it is not easy to achieve the perfect combination of the business needs of water companies and information technology. It is difficult for current intelligent water suppliers and their solutions to translate the business needs of water companies into technical needs. This means that the use of intelligent water meters can bring new value-added modes for water companies, such as household leakage detection and care for the elderly.

 

Since intellectualization is an inevitable trend and intelligent water meter is an inevitable choice, how to meet these three prerequisites?

 

All this changed until NB-IoT appeared!

NB-IoT gives us hope

Standard Unified and Convenient NB-IoT Internet of Things Water Meter

 

 

The emergence of NB-IoT as a 3GPP standard is of great significance to the water industry. Standardization is helpful to solve the problem of interconnection of wireless meter terminals in water industry. Water companies need not bother to consider the docking problem of different meter plants when purchasing terminals in the future. Interoperability and product compatibility are effectively addressed.