Around 30 million meters with NB-IoT have been installed so far and the results proved to be promising with 99 percent impeccable collection of meter data.
After much heated discussions in the nation over Power Grid Corporation of India (PGCIL) backed by state and along with the 5G technology for installing millions of new-fangled smart meters, researchers stated that the launch of Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) connectivity technology is now largely implemented by both consumers and enterprises all over the world. After the counterblast, the state backed power corporation has supposedly slowed down the last date of tender to install around 1 crore smart electricity meters.
Due to this scenario, outdated second generation (2G) and RF mesh frequency has been pushed from August 30 to September 9. The industry leaders opined that the volume of active NB-IoT connections are escalating into Crores, the GDP and economy is also augmenting, which produces a virtuous circle that will spearhead larger deployments. Now, as this technology has improved in the past few years, the well-known manufacturers in the country have integrated NB-IoT technology and have unveiled smart meters backed by this technology.
For instance, JioThings Smart Electricity Metering solution by Reliance Industries, claimed to be the country's first and comprehensive NB-IoT enabled smart metering solution offers a complete range of solutions Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and Automatic Meter Reading (AMR). Jio has NB-IoT connectivity across India covering 95 percent of the population. In fact, the company also provides Jio Cloud Services certified by MeitY for hosting the smart metering applications and a scalable meter data collection using Head End System (HES) integrated with leading Meter Data Management System (MDMS) as per an exclusive report by IANS.
Researchers also mentioned that NB-IoT offers future guarantee to the operators' 5G IoT proposition. The technology is said to be very cost-effective to supervise support-based service proposals and huge volumes of assets and this is mostly for applications with low-bandwidth requirements. According to some surveys, around 30 million meters with NB-IoT have been installed so far and the results proved to be promising with 99 percent impeccable collection of meter data.
