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the battery and that is significant when thousands of meters need their batteries replaced in a few months’ time.” In summary, there is a lot at stake, and water suppliers need to consider many factors to provide effective solutions in the field.
is that an object is not attached to a specific base station unlike cellular protocols. The emitted message is received by any base stations that are nearby and on average the number of base stations is three. This is called spatial diversity. Water metering can be taking measurements related to consumption, pressure at different key distribution points and trying to assess, crucially, if there are any leaks. “The return on investment of these systems comes from better management of resources,” Kantaros detailed. “By having all of these measurements we can proactively or retroactively take correcting measures with precision and accuracy for preserving water resources. “Most of these proactive measurements are taken in the field by smart devices that are either autonomous modules or they are integrated into the metering devices,” he continued, “For example, you can have water flow meters monitoring the water network to measure the pressure and other elements.” Sigfox 0G technology is preferable for serving water metering and monitoring, Kantaros said, because of its longevity and low power consumption – meaning batteries need to be replaced less frequently. “There are other IoT protocols that are not best suited for solutions such as water metering because they are using the TCP/ IP protocol,” he said. “For example, if I’m sending a measurement and the server doesn’t receive it, I’ll have to resend the message. That presents a risk of depleting
SATELLITE TECHNOLOGIES STEPPING UP
It’s not just network technologies that are supporting connectivity but satellite technologies too. This is a market that has been experiencing a significant amount of growth as companies have sought to make satellite technology more cost-effective and accessible, where historically, old technology has been too expensive to deploy, to ensure global connectivity. Making satellite technology more accessible is the “vision” of Sateliot, according to Stephan Bernard, Head of Business Development at the company, since the company’s founding in 2018. “The vision has always been to make satellite IoT connectivity accessible, cost- effective and massive,” he explained. The approval of 3GPP Release 17 in 2022 was an instrumental turning point because non-terrestrial networks (NTN) became part of the standard. Prior to this point, satellite IoT connectivity had not had a standard on which to operate. After this point, Bernard said, they stopped focusing on approval and instead started focusing on the execution of their technology. “If you take a look at the legacy satellite market, which are all based on proprietary networks – meaning they each have a specific communication protocol –
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