Indian telecommunications provider Bharti Airtel has teamed up with Secure Meters, a company that focuses on users of energy in homes and workplaces to help reduce energy waste, to deploy 1.3 million smart meters in Bihar, a state in eastern India. The smart meters will use NB-IoT services.
NB-IoT is a low-power, wide area radio network technology developed and specified by standards body 3GPP; it enables a wide variety of IoT devices and services including smart meters.
According to Airtel, this will be the country’s first narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) solution with a fall-back option able to work on 2G and 4G, and aiming to ensure real-time connectivity and uninterrupted transfer of critical data.
Airtel says its NB-IoT platform is future-ready and scalable to 5G. The proposition also includes an advanced IoT platform called The Airtel IoT Hub, which has been customised to suit the needs of advance metering infrastructure service providers (AMISPs) and includes a feasibility tool to help AMISPs plan their meter deployments.
Other functionalities include customer life cycle management and advanced analytics tools like diagnostics, live sessions check and real-time data usage among others.
Airtel suggests its network is ready for pan India NB-IoT deployment.
