As part of its comprehensive water security plan, Cairns Regional Council is deploying a revolutionary intelligent connectivity and analytics solution to tackle water leaks and deliver better customer outcomes.
Under its smart water networks project, Cairns Regional Council is collaborating with leading digital solutions provider, Itron, to modernise its water distribution system over a three-year period.
These works will build on phase one of the Council’s smart water network project, which saw an initial deployment of Itron’s Intelis ultrasonic water meters and integrated IoT network solution.
In this second phase, Itron and the Council are working together to deploy additional Intelis smart water meters, which will be managed by Itron’s Temetra NB-IoT digital platform, to improve collection, tracking and management of water data from all endpoints within its network.
Itron’s Temetra platform is purpose-built to enable water utilities to seamlessly analyse water data from multi-vendor meters to highlight consumption patterns, identify irregularities and generate billing information in a way that more accurately reflects water usage.
Once the Intelis wSource water meters and NB-IoT digital platform are deployed, this solution will allow the Council to quickly identify and respond to challenges and streamline its operations.
Enabling a digital transformation
As populations increase and droughts and extreme weather events become more frequent, water security is a pressing concern for utilities and councils across Australia.
Digital solutions have a pivotal role to play in tackling these concerns, as they allow utilities and municipalities like Cairns Regional Council to proactively manage infrastructure assets, demand and operational challenges.
To assist water utilities with this digital transformation, Itron recently expanded the capabilities of its Temetra platform to include NB-IoT communications.
Itron Director of Water, Australia, New Zealand & Pacific, Bruce Kain, said that the addition of NB-IoT provides water utilities with greater flexibility and the ability to consolidate technologies and data sources into a single platform.
“We want to give water utilities access to the best networks available to enable their assets to communicate in the field regardless of technology,” Mr Kain said.
“Cellular NB-IoT has good coverage across Australia and it is currently one of the preferred choices for utilities. As a vendor, we’ve listened to that and invested a lot in our devices and software solutions to support multi-networks and devices under.”
The expansion of Temetra to include NB-IoT works in tandem with the platform’s existing support for multiple communication protocols, to provide utilities with true interoperability at all stages of the transition to a digital future.
“In a country like Australia, where we have very sparse regional areas combined with really dense urban centres around the coastline, utilities have the challenge of managing both rural parts of their network as well as major cities. Choosing solutions that give them the option to have different technologies, for different parts of their region is paramount,” Mr Kain said.
Itron Solutions Architect Mohammad Saudi explain that the addition of NB-IoT capabilities enables utilities to seamlessly integrate this technology without adding unnecessary complexity.
“Temetra was built for water, and these integrations and enhancements are designed to help the utilities to run more efficiently.
“Some traditional platforms were built to deal with endpoints or devices, but they don’t really understand what these devices are, so you get a lot of data from the meter but it’s overwhelming. [Temetra] is designed to be able to take that data and put it in the right context that a utility can handle, manage and action,” Mr Saudi said.
“This can then help them to monitor the water usage better, detect leakages faster and respond to issues more quickly. That means less water loss, saving money and happier customers.”
As Temetra can gather diverse data sources and technologies into a single unified platform, this enables greater technology choices and eliminates vendor lock-in. Which in turn reduces integration costs and allows utilities to adopt or pilot new technologies with minimal operational impacts.
“Our focus is to enable utilities with a platform that supports a digital journey at their own pace that’s both backward and forward compatible significantly reducing risk and creating accelerated ROI,” Mr Kain said.
Driving operational efficiencies
Temetra NB-IoT digital platform allows utilities to read meters remotely and consolidates all data onto a single platform, which both boosts operational efficiency and reduces risk of incidents.
Mr Kain said that Itron’s focus was to create a platform that can centralise all available information and then integrate that data into a utility’s work order management, billing system, customer portal and customer support team so that everything can be access all in one place.
“As all the information is coming from the same place, it significantly reduces integration costs from systems and removes the need for multiple user interfaces for the utility to manage.
“A benefit of partnering with Itron is access to local industry experts, backed by a global backing, to support the utilities we work with.
“In the Australian New Zealand market, there’s really diverse and extremely challenging environmental conditions, and Itron has a long history of supporting these customers across the region. We really look forward to expanding these offerings even further and continuing to build solutions that are tailored for this market by first understanding what those real challenges are, and then helping solve some of those challenging issues,” Mr Kain said.
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