Smart Metering: How IoT Has Changed the Utilities Market

okay and we are live hello good afternoon good morning good evening everybody thank you for joining us for this webinar about smart meters and about how iot has changed upper gear in the utilities market and really as per um number of recent articles on the RCR website I suggest this is session is also about why smart meters are the most important play in the whole iot game because uh for society and for the planet smart meters are the essential Network and data hub for the whole energy transition and for iot makers and iot operators they are just about the only or or certainly one of the very few sectors with the kind of muscle to justify an entire infrastructure rollout and so if Innovation is happening anywhere in iot it is happening here with Smart Meters so we will get into some of that today my name is James Blackman I'm an editor with RCR Wireless and I'm your chair for this session which is brought to you in association with Keegan and tet cion which uh separately and combined have got most of the iot market covered and are both driving innovation in the smart meter space and we will hear from both companies shortly some housekeeping uh just to begin this session is being recorded and the recording will be available on demand later today slides will be available to registrant after the event we will have time in the second half to take questions I'd encourage you to submit those um at any time throughout the session using the Q&A dialogue box in the platform we will get to them as we can uh and note as well the panel will switch their cameras on and go to video for the Q&A section in the second half we will just run with audio and slides until that point okay so the first thing is to introduce our panel we have four Fant fantastic deeply knowledgeable highly opinionated speakers today so I would like to introduce in order of appearance Matt Arnot who is a principal Analyst at Transformer insights Matt is an experienced analyst and consultant who specializes in quantitative analysis and forecasting of new technology markets he has a close watching brief on smart meters and Transformer insights I would suggest has established itself as the premier analyst house in the iot space I'd also like to introduce Lo bonal who is senior vice president for Solutions and marketing at Keegan Lo has 20 years of experience in the iot and M2M markets covering product marketing technical sales application engineering R&D Keegan in case you don't know once part of arm is a crucial player and innovator in the the iot space for Sim identity provisioning and security Fabian Petty is Chief technology officer at ubic Fabian heads software development and techn Technology strategy at uh ubic and he is familiar on the iot circuit just about every iot show I turn up to uh and ubic for reference is an emerging power in the Ami and private LTE Market offering hybrid weightless and cellular for utilities and it is one just about every other tender going in its Home Market and is a develop developing play in Europe North America and elsewhere and finally Neil Bosworth who is head of vertical segments at telet Centurion Neil's in charge of vertical marketing and strategy tet Centurion which is the biggest iot module maker in the west and a whole lot more besides also offering mvno connectivity Sim identity security services and so on uh Smart Energy and smart metering is a key part of Neil's remit at tet interion so welcome all thanks for joining us we'll hear from uh each speaker in just a moment a quick look at the agenda today just so everyone is aware of the order of service as it were each of our panelists will present for five or six minutes on the subject of smart meters I will let each of them introduce themselves say a little bit more uh about themselves and their companies and their views on the market we'll then go to this Q&A session in the second half we're down for an hour so we should have plenty of time for questions like I say please ask as we go and we will get to them after the presentations something quickly about RCR Wireless as well this is uh this is boilerplate stuff but to give you some background RCR Wireless has been around since before the dawn of time or at least as long as the mobile industry anyway since 19 1981 82 uh and as you go to for News interviews insights about all things Wireless RCR uh now integrates enter Enterprise it insights as well as inbu building Tech so it is your one stop for uh News and Views on digital change within the wireless sector itself and how digital change is being sold to the rest of the world as well and the target audien is uh well everyone in in kind of tech and telecoms really every Enterprise vertical buying from techken telecoms and you can find us online variously just a note as well to say that we write lots of reports and this session will be followed by long form editorial report which will summarize and extend the discussion from today and this slide actually shows a bunch of stuff that were published mostly by Enterprise I insights through to the end of uh 2022 the new report on Smart meet will I'd suggest more closely follow the story that all of these tell perhaps in the traditional RCR Fair anyway these are all available online they're all free to download so look them up just a quick note as well that we have a big event coming up the industrial 5G Forum which is online on November the 7th and we'll cover some of the aspects from today's session particularly about private networks and Industrial iot uh and you can find that easily via the RCR website okay and back to the agenda so we start with Matt from Transformer insights who will kick us off with a kind of uh I guess a kind of a SWAT analysis of the market about the key trends and opportunities and uh where it's all going so Matt thanks for joining us over to you thank you for the introduction James and hello everyone as James said I'm Matt arnard I'm an analyst at Transformer insights where I'm responsible for all things forecasting really uh for those of you who aren't familiar with our work uh we're a technology research Consulting them broadly focused on iot uh but also the the greater world of digital transformation uh which you include things like artificial intelligence Edge Computing uh Robotics and so on um as part of today's session I'll be giving a quick overview of the state of the market and uh how the future looks for smart metering using some fairly high level data from our our very granular iot forecast of which smart metering represents a small but significant part uh I should start off uh by saying that smart metering is a a fairly mature Market as iot goes many countries have already reached full deployment of electric and gas smart meters or are assume to do so um in fact we reached 50% of all homes with electricity having a an electric smart meter in July this year this is causing some quite noticeable changes in where smart meters are being deployed shipments in previous years were very much concentrated in developed countries but the developing world is starting to represent a significant Market particularly for electric Smart Meters so on our chart to the left here we're showing the regional split of electric smart meter sales uh out to 2032 and as an example of this shift away from developed countries uh we can see that Latin America will become a bigger Market than North America next year and the traditional Trio of leading regions that's North America China and Europe will represent less than half the market for the first time we can also see that there's significant growth in Southeast Asia and India and South Asia occurring in the next few years zooming out a bit from this chart and thinking about the market from a more scale perspective uh many countries that had so far been resisting a smart met to roll out have been spurred on by recent concerns about energy costs and energy security uh so we can expect an uptick in in growth towards the end of the first 20s as a result changes are coming uh from a communication technology perspective as well uh nbiot is finally starting to come in now outside of China but in Europe 2G shipment still remain that much higher um that situation is going to be very shortlived uh Europe had an 89% share of uh Global 2G electric metor shipment in 2022 but we're expecting there to be almost none uh being shipped in 2029 China's been leading the way for MB met deployments for for many years now uh and that Situation's changing uh China had an 83% share of MB electric meter sales in 2021 uh but that will have dropped down to 48% uh at the end of this year a lot of that share being taken up by southeast Asia and Europe the discussion around Smart Meters often defaults to electricity meters as I've rather done here uh but on my next slide I've got a bit of an overview on gas and water meters as well um so here we can see a comparison of gas and water smart meter sales over the course of our forecast historically gas smart meter sales were higher than their water equivalence but that Trend reversed in 2021 just off the left of this chart uh and we're only going to see that Trend continue really um this is all uh despite uh the high gas prices that we saw um pretty much throughout 2022 uh and it's more of a reflection on gas smer roll outs finishing uh in developed countries whilst developing countries are beginning their roll out and water Start Me comparison uh of course natural gas usage as well has a much more limited geographical range with gas use at home mostly found in developed countries outside water use of course being almost Universal in comparison from a more long-term perspective uh water stress was uh a topic that uh came back to the four again last year following some fairly severe droughts throughout a lot of the world um and this stress is is going to translate to an increase uh in desire for monitoring of water use um and that trend is only going to accelerate um unfortunately we're we're looking at roughly 2ir of the world's population um being uh well expecting to face uh water stress by the end of 2025 um and this is fairly indicative of recent Trend that we've seen in iot as a whole where sustainability has become quite a large Market driver uh energy Independence has also become a more relevant Topic in the the past 18 months uh that combined with a huge number of net zero emissions targets uh will mean that gas use will need to be that much more heavily monitored um but uh there will also s gradual move away from the use of gas for domestic heating which will ultimately reduce the the market for gas meters over a longer period of time um hopefully that's uh that quick overview of some of the broader trends at the global level was a good way to start off the session and uh with that I'll I'll hand back to you James Matt thank you that's that's great um really interesting perhaps we'll pick through some of those uh stats in a moment uh but for now we're going to hand over over to uh to lock Keegan who's going to talk about uh well he said my guest is the Cornerstone of iot scalability I believe uh lock uh I'll leave to you to explain yeah thank you James yeah great to be here and to uh to present some some thoughts on on metering and Keegan so yeah we can move on to the next slide yeah so just a brief few words about Keegan so Keegan is focusing on securing connected devices at large right and we do that notably through the mean of eim and IIM and and also for cellular devices so to achieve that we we have several offers and services right we have a we have a SIM eim IIM OS that can go into different form factors that you know for the Sim plastic Sim so durable Sim integrated Sim and we have the ways to personalized those SIM cards uh whether it's uh in the factory of one of our partners uh for a discrete SIM card or working directly with chipsets with modu maker with secury to personalize and and provision cards and even now we see a recent Trends towards enabling more and more the actual OEM sometimes the smart meter manufacturer to actually go and and provision their cards for for their deployments uh we do offer also uh ecsp solutions for the infield management so Keegan has services for SP for M2M consumer and working actively on iot RSP we're still chairing the the gsma group that is developing the iot sgp32 specifications and finally the last bit in the in the bottom right corner is the applicative security offering and revolve today mostly around iot safe and that is really leveraging the Hardware security that Sim or IIM provide for applicative use that is that Hardware security is mated let's say to secure the T the Telco and the communication but we can also use it for the application for example give a unique identity into a cloud into a back end to a device so we can move to the next so cellular iot specifically for smart metering um I think uh we see uh thanks to notably Matt's figure right a quite significant adoption of a smart metering at large and cellular is not the only way to achieve connectivity for metering but that's one way to achieve a pretty flat and simple architecture especially when cellular goes all the way to the end point to the metering point or to a hub that is going to connect to several meters for example in the case of the UK deployment uh you have a hub that connects to a variety of meter gas electricity and so on so to uh achieve uh I would say deployments effectively uh meter manufacturer like to remove from the equation a plastic Sim right because plastic seim don't necessarily meet the necessary environmentals uh regulatory requirements it's not necessarily as durable as it should be so uh a soldered eim or an integrated Sim is is more appropriate in that case now with E and IIM come the need to be able to personalize and load the right connectivity uh in each meter for say a meter goes to a specific geographies in need a certain connectivity connectivity player to be to be available on that meter and that's uh among the things that we work closely with uh the manufacturing Partners to to enable so and once uh the device is in the field uh typically also in metering you have a need to uh really have long life cycles right to 20 years for example uh in some cases and so uh the service provider who actually deploys or the utility who deploys those meters have to find a way to ensure connectivity for this long period of time which is not something typically the MOs support right they don't typically sign a 20 years contract so you need the ability to switch provider during Lifetime right and that's where uh RSP remote provisioning comes in uh and and really help to deliver that function and again this can work on classical eim Sol syon factor or already today on some integrated s factor as well so um we can move on to the next so some of the driver for adoption of v in smart metering that we can see uh uh one of them is the shift from proprietary to standard based solution that is notably in the sense of for example in some deployment you have a combination of transmission technology you might have CPL Plus Cellular or mesh Plus Cellular uh and uh it's very adapted in in some deployment but sometimes if you dealing with uh for example gas and water meter which do not have easy access to power or to actually a wire to transport the data right like you have in electricity uh a meter on a single charge battery with cellular connectivity is what making sense and that's what we've seen heavy used notably in China with nbiot but also now coming to more and more markets across Europe uh and the Americas uh so in China we've seen quite a lot of adoption around nbot in the rest of the world we see typically a mix of cm and NB being used um and one also driver which I think is important is disels a better I would say control over the consumption right and potentially as mat mentioning we deal more and more with uh stress notably to water access and we might come down to to actually pretty strict measures for consumption are on water and this can be enabled with metering solution that report daily usage notably right so that's one aspect another interesting aspect is 25% of the water for example in France is lost in distribution right if you monitor the network and Market uh the sorry the network the water Network better uh we can hopefully reduce this uh losses during distribution of water of clean water to the end users last point being uh there is always a price pressure on metering assets right most governments regions cities want to be very careful about public money spending and thus you know being able to come to the best cost Point POS for theer while meeting the requirements is really important next one please I won't go so much in detail here but that's some of the E numbers that we've seen right uh from the research that we've collected over the years uh with the overall uh Market dollar opportunity estimated at 16 million plus a strong grow of iot and M2 MIM uh profile download in 2022 we are now working in multi I would say trials for the new specification iot RSP uh and finally the number of units to be shipped by 2028 using eim or IIM we estimate a total of six billion so it becomes a prevalent uh number uh of e and I enabled devices uh it's really now uh come smart vendors and it's starts also to be the case in some of the iot markets notably Ming Kean offering notably really specifically apply to metering again there is the RSP aspect that helps to manage the infield management there is potential to use iot safe also for metering security quite often the security in metering system has been through proprietary quite complex systems so I think there is an opportunity here to Simply if and to rationalize some of the security deployment in some case notably for the Greenfield deployments and one topic we I'm sure discuss a lot with with James and the panel later is the problematic of personalization in Factory right uh not pictured here but really something that we spend a lot of time and energy on those days in metering because uh there is a strong expectation to simplify the logistics of establish in connectivity in meters and there's still a lot of potential Improvement to be done to simplify this supply chain all right I think that's it thank you that's perfect well done thank you so much and uh we're going to move on interest of time we're going to move on uh swiftly and I'd like to introduce uh Fabian Petty gr who's uh uh in charge of technology and strategy at Taiwan based ubic Fabian it's over to you thank you James and and thanks for having me so yeah I'm Fabian CD of ubic and uh yeah we describe oursel as a leading solution provider for AMI connectivity and UT connectivity in general uh so if we go to the first slide actually uh this is to describe what essentially got us started so ubic was found in 2016 and is since 2018 Ami service provider to the soul utility company in Taiwan called Taiwan power which started its smart meter roll out in 2018 so we are providing the communication infrastructure piece of the Ami so one piece of the Ami is a meter itself we don't provide meters those are actually supplied by different smart meter vendors but those meters are not communic ating then another piece is the communication infrastructure so from the fan or the Nick card that goes into the meter to the potential DCU or gatways needed to collect the information to the server s database and headend system and then we are responsible for pushing that information to typ hour's mdms which is again a separate piece of the Ami infrastructure so there are three layers in the tendering that has been done in for high power the mdms is a single one the communication infrastructure which ubit is the largest provider of but there are other companies four or five as of now and the smart meter themselves with six or seven smart meter vendors present in Taiwan for those deployment so as of today we have close to 1.2 million meters under contract some we are still deploying the connection for those so we will reach a number in the field by end of 2024 as of now we have more than 700,000 already deployed and running in Taiwan so we are providing the equipment the software as well as the service to operate maintain and provide the data to type hour so in that particular deployment we actually use a mix of communication technologies always Wireless because that's the hurt of what everything we do at ubic but we use a mixture of non- cellular lp1 technology so in this case is w an open standard that we have implemented and deployed in a license band in Taiwan and we use cellular so ndot and a little bit of LTM km1 as a complementary technology for covering when it doesn't necessarily make sense to deploy our weightless space station or DCU data concentrator unit as it's called in the Mii world so uh maybe moving to the next slide uh this this projects have allowed the company to grow and we have actually recently also announced the acquisition of New Zealand based myox so this acquisition has been completed in July uh and this now gives us a pretty Global footprint in with offices in the US Canada France India Taiwan Japan New Zealand and Australia and myx gives us access to their strong customer base especially in the Us North American market for connectivity for the utilities so the team now is 150 people strong and and and developing markets outside of Taiwan aggressively now so if the next slide uh maybe just to show then ubic product offering so since the acquisition of mamax and and the development we have done so we have a wide range of con connectivity Solutions so from the mission critical type of connectivity so those radios on the top like the one called Tornado this is typically to operate in private spectrum that utilities might have it's a for narrow band communication so that's 12.5 or 25 Kilz channels delivering more than one megabit per second so those are very high efficiency radios offering less than three millisecond latency for the higher end of the use cases of utilities so think about teles surveillance for instance where you do need to shut down the the lines with a very very low latency then we have I would say the less critical connectivity solution and smart metering could be considered somewhat less critical connectivity so we have the weight L base station that we have deployed with a great success in Taiwan we have more than 2,000 base station deployed all across Taiwan for IMI deployment um we also actually have released last year our first we call iot base station it's actually a full-fledged 3gpp cellular so LTE base station or e notb in 3gp terms but really tailored to the use cases of utilities so it's designed for deployment in Fairly narrow Spectrum 1.43 or up to 5 mehz BWI and it can operate in uh different license B so the commercial BS Ben 8 Ben 28 Ben 3 or private LTE bands which are actually getting a lot of traction in the US so we have version operating in the entx band8 which is B 106 right now also operating in the nbiot only B 103 which is Leed to utilities by select Spectrum as well as very recently we announced our collaboration with liado to support their 1.67 GHz tdd 5 MHz

block which they also intend to provide to utilities to deploy their private hey networks so we have we are to release also a Bas station operating LT cm1 tdd 5 MHz specifically for that b and for those utility use cases and more recently we have also released actually a LTM km1 bay station but operating in the unlensed 902 to 928 mahz bent uh in the US so it got FCC ified in May so it does actually mean that you can connect existing LTM devices that are traditionally operating or supporting B 8 directly can connect to that LTM Bas station operating in the unlicensed B without any hardware or even software change and that's something that can allow utilities to actually extend the coverage potentially if they use cellular connectivity and they don't get the coverage from their preferred operators they can actually fill the gaps with with freerun in unlicensed band which is a band that they are very familiar with because as of today in especially North America most of the Ami and smart meters are using unlicensed band for their connectivity so be it itron with their mesh technology all ENT gear they traditionally have been using mesh technology even though there is a strong push to private L right now or it could be a choice as well for utilities that really want to go to Cellular and to private LTE but that do not have necessarily the scale or the capital to really engage with very large players no Sy ericon no care for the base stations which are actually coming at premium for utilities that may only deploy in three me pwid so free R could be an alternative for that as well it's a it's a fully 3pp compliant solution that we are actively promoting and that is attracting a lot of of of attention and we've demonstrated already we've tested with some smart meter vendors like itron we've tested in their lab demonstrated that integrating that with a Verizon back hole on that base station so offering quite a few possibilities and uh obviously to L point when you start to integrate freerun or those base station along with public networks and comes a question of how do you move from public to private networks and how do you manage a seam so that it can connect to all those Networks now we provide as well uh NX or fans so those are the essentially communication modems or modules that go into the meters so we have modules supporting wless we have modules supporting LTM for the different bands even private LT bands and we are ver supporting nbiot as well as combined Solutions now so we are about to release a combined solution which is using a single chipset to support both weightless and nbiot to give you the full flexibility when you have no coverage from one or the other and we are also to release L rouers specific to utility use cases so it could be if to collect uh smart meter information or capacitor Banks or or what not and finally we are a software provider as well so we provide a headend system and we have actually the largest deployment by far which is the one we run in Taiwan with more than 700,000 meters and we are procing more than 80 million meter readings every day because those are electricity meters so they report readings every 15 minutes and you need to deliver them within 15 minutes and then they have extra readings every hour with some additional information instantaneous voltage frequency instantaneous current and then we also have a daily report called the Bing which is the midnight which is actually used for billing purposes faan can I I'm going to stop you there if I can just of the time I know You' got I think you may have a couple more slides but I think there's a lot in there if I may and we'll we'll come back to some of it but just to yes so maybe you move to you can move quick to uh the other one was just to show some picture of deployments uh and uh and the fact that we have solution for deployment and coverage uh uh planification to where do you want to place your base station etc for deploying Mii networks so that's let me let me in because because I want to give Neil time to to to to uh present his piece and these slides will be made available after this event and uh obviously we we we will talk and we will we've got a report coming and we will get into some of that stuff if you don't mind but but thank you so much that was that was really fantastic and you have I there's a lot going on in there so it's a it's a a really kind of captivating kind of story so but uh without further Ado Neil I'd like to hand over to you uh and uh you know really if you want know anything about IAT then Neil and tet Centurion other other places to go so Neil it's over to you thank you and uh hello everyone uh it's great to be here I'll I'll I'll be prompt and I'll be pretty high level so uh if you'd like to move on to the next slide please so firstly a little bit about our company at the beginning of 2023 teip combined with the iot experience from Talis forming a new company tet Centurion with the Centum word coming from the iot product branding from Talis and both companies have got a long long history in iot going back into the 1990s and excuse me our combined goal was always industrial iot uh providing Cellular Connections and services to the most critical iot applications and energy and utilities have long been a focus and we've got a significant heritage footprint in this market which we really continue to focus on and address with uh with tet intering okay next slide please but as we're talking about smart metering today I mean we've been active in this area since the very first AMR deployments know the automatic meter reading deployments when it uh began a long time ago uh reliably connecting smart metor infrastructure is a huge challenge for dsos and utilities and integrators and they're faced with a bewildering choice of connectivity options each with his own strengths and weaknesses and we're now either seeing brand new deployments or second phase updates because there's a natural refresh life cycle across all continents and and these rollouts are really driven by the need to preserve or manage the available energy and moved toward towards more flexible grids which in turn requ ire more flexible and smarter homes and appliances but across these deployments decisions really need to be made about the most efficient and secure means to connect them throughout the long duration of service and the choice of connectivity scheme and we've heard a few today already and sometimes it's driven by Legacy so um in the US for example we heard earlier that the vast majority of meters were connected by RF mesh technology uh they may look to build on this topology but we also see a trend going to more more towards cellular uh Europe has seen uh a lot of PLC rollouts but it's mainly cellular and in Japan and India a combination of uh of short range Wireless technology along with cellular uh with emerging Asia uh looking towards cellular for fresh deployments I I won't go into all the reasons behind this but as a rule of thumb cellular communication provides a ke role in all topologies regardless of the communication technology present at the meter and this Cellular Connection needs to work reliably and when you consider uh Gateway or mesh use cases where one Gateway can be responsible for thousands of end points this Cellular Connection is really key okay next slide please so in select interium we've got many touch points in the smart metering landscape with millions of meters connected using our cellular module mod uh which is creating the vital comms link and today the popular technology choices are category M narab BAND iot or cat one but it doesn't end there we're delivering tools and platforms to enable life cycle management for smart meter deployments uh to take advantage of eim Technology subscription management for manufacturing and infield use cases offering the ultimate flexibility and chosing the most appropriate uh M I won't go into this because lox mentioned a lot of it already uh we provide uh device management capabilities to ensure security and firmware upgrades at scale and we work with also with short range technology for smart home and where we're also working on mesh technology to complement our cellular uh experience and we even work with the industry to develop Communications gateways and cards okay next slide please here I mentioned some of the pain point points we look to address across the smart metering ecosystem uh the dsos the meter Solutions providers alike so rather than just supplying cellular modules we kind of understand the pain points to help tune our portfolio and sort of tune our product offerings um we're in the unique position to be able to provide Solutions both hardware and services covering multiple disciplines with our Focus really being on security and reliably collecting the meter to this headend system it's a complex ecosystem that has many challenges and constraints with the added complexity of being a prime cyber security Target whilst also the additional complexity of being extremely cost sensitive and finally to my last slide so as I said rather than being a component provider to the industry you can see we've got a multi-layer approach as cellular modules are embedded in millions of meters and gateways or concent trators uh packed with features to help meter manufacturers control their cost whilst providing a range of module Technologies to cover the wide demands of global metering rollout uh subscription management uh enables the esim to provide value across all stages of a meter's life from manufacturing or to the active service and combining the uh or combining on it or embedding the eim with the module gives us a clear path to help our customers migrate to isim and this is an example of addressing demands of an industry in terms of skew control uh we are in fact an mvno which can sometimes be a good option for AMI uh we use this technology to complement subscription management and we provide full custom Hardware Solutions too to the industry we're not really in the business of building tet Centurion branded gateways or or concentrat moreover we have the communications and product expertise to provide a solution a hardware solution and software beyond the module encompassing our product and services technology and then very finally uh with our Talis Heritage remember I said we some of us came from Talis uh we look towards uh Key Management covering use cases from in Factory uh provisioning and key injection and credential management so that's me I'd like to hand back over James and we can continue the discussion Neil thank you so much that's brilliant okay um we have got some questions coming thank you for those we will come to them uh in just a moment at this point I would like um the panelists to switch their cameras on uh and I will stop the slid share and you should hopefully see us all hello everyone how are we doing so um so yes there some questions coming in and we will get to those shortly I mean just maybe to start and there's a couple of uh points here there's a question here about the attach rate on cellular Matt which I might come to you for but just just as context I mean we we to the the perhaps the cellular industry talks about meters in this way but it's it's as if it's as if it is a cellular Market but but cellular is is but a fraction of the of the connectivity mix right just talk us about talk to us about that and and at the same time explain the importance of this Market to um to iot if you like and to Cellular iot because it is the kind of a market I mean you you've we we've written a story We published a story where you called it a kind of a market maker so just explain both both those kind of aspects if you can yeah sure well I think Neil sumed it up quite well actually just then saying that really it's a it's a market that's quite High highly reliant on seller in every single uh country country pretty much um but it does vary massively of course um the early rollouts particularly in Europe weren't that heavily reliant on Cell on a meter by meter basis a lot of them rying on PLC and you'd end up with um maybe 5 10% that were perhaps off grid if you were a bit further away from a concentrator doesn't really make sense to use PLC in those cases so there were a cellular meter um so a small number of meters the concentrators of course were almost always cellular so you're reliant on cellia at some point in the chain it's just it may not be for every single meter um the attach rates I think I said they're 5 to 10% in many of those countries um in 2023 our forecasts um we're saying about 25% of of all meters have some sort of onboard Cellular Connection uh that varies hugely by country so China is very heavily run out on mbot here in the UK we have a lot of a lot of Cellular Communications oners uh big uh big variance by country basically looking at it from a global perspective isn't always that handy um but it is moving more towards Cellular in general I think uh at the moment we're looking at so there's 25% uh cellular installed in meters but you're looking at 40% of ship meters 30 to 40% are uh have some sort of cellular connectivity on board so it's definitely moving more towards cellular um side of things but it's quite a a market with quite a lot of inertia obviously um to that market maker um kind of perspective um we're obviously in a time where there are quite a few um new connectivity Technologies coming through a lot of new networks being set up for mbot um Laura onean those sort of new technologies coming through they by definition those um networks are being set up without necessarily having any big customers in play and we have seen a few Networks disappear overnight basically because they don't have the the interest um out there um to really continue having a smart metering uh contract can basically sustain those networks for um 10 15 years right so signing up to one of those contracts can really make a market and from a um utilities that's from utilities perspective that's sort of quite advantageous you have a more symbiotic relationship with the network you have more say perhaps if how the network is run downside of course being there maybe limited Alternatives if it's quite a more of a niche new technology end users as well could could really Advantage for that because there's some element of security in that Network right so it's it's quite a benefit for Network operators as well if you can effectively say we're going to support this network 15 years because this is our this is our customer base um the that's is a sort of double-edged Sword though because we've got things like in Europe where um the 2G networks are starting to be switched off in many countries but not all countries are doing so because the 2D networks are important to keep Smart Meters running right so sometimes it may be a downside for Network operators keep having to keep the um the network running longer than it should be okay and thank you Matt and Neil perhaps you bring you in just around the the cellular mix and how that's developing I mean because you take a market like France and Italy you know which is which are Powerline markets and they presumably stay that way but the point you're making is that somewhere in the mix cellula will come in and then presumably on the as a CounterPoint in newer markets in Africa some of the markets that Matt referenced where where the growth is coming this will be the default choice is that is that correct would you say that kind of analysis um I I I would say that we we see solar consider in every country and and as Matt was saying um and as I said earlier if not directly at the meter um it will certainly play some part some role in the ecosystem um uh in France and in Spain there's quite a lot of PLC today in Italy actually it's a mix it's it's uh there's quite a lot of narrow band iot in Italy uh especially with the with the gas industry uh and then we we you know we look forward to the rollouts that are going to be coming across Europe Germany is is the next Hot Topic uh where today there's a limited roll out of gateways uh for for high consumers and they're all based on on cellular um maybe I lost track of the question here but I think um I I honestly think what we're going to see going forward is more of an approach of hybrid networks uh we start to see it with uh with PLC today because I think uh in the PLC World um you know it does have its weaknesses along with every other technology and we're starting to see a hybrid approach uh combining PLC with with RF and I think we'll also start to see much more of an overlap between cellular and short range uh mesh Technologies and ISM band Technologies because both technologies have their benefits and both technologies have their weaknesses and the trick is I think going forward is to try and pluck the benefits from all the Technologies and combine them together yeah okay Fabian I mean that seems to be your message uh you know taking your experience in Taiwan and complimenting weightless with with nbit and cellular here and there just there's a question here about the pros and cons of of weightless versus uh cellular lp1 Technologies just can you can you sum up for us yeah well I will concur with what Neil said so of course we have implemented weight L and we we we are promoter of the technology so that's in the lp1 space so it's also an Arab band low data rate long range technology so it's not a mesh technology uh you can compare Technologies themselves so wless has similar link budget than you will get with NT or Laura but it does provide the network management and scheduling that gives you the capacity required for electricity metering Network for instance but ND and LTM are equally good Technologies there might be a higher cost as well but the thing is the main difference I will see is with weight less and that's kind of true for unlicensed Technologies is that you can always deliver the coverage and the SLA to the utility whereas in the cellular world if you rely purely on Commercial networks then you will always face issue with coverage and uh one thing is in in Taiwan for Taiwan power actually the tender was not mandating any communication technology he was really requiring slas so 20 18 was 95% of the meter reading will need to arrive in time back then the in time meant within four hours and now we are up to 96.5% needs to be arriving in time in time meaning within 15 minutes and in the end uh the only viable way to achieve that at scale for millions of meter is indeed an hybrid type of topology so in our case we use wiress for the vast majority of our devices and we complement with cellular and sometimes when we start to complement with nvt and we've run into the problem of capacity of NV because it has very limited capacity on Commercial Network when they sign on one channel then we can kind of fall back to weight less or ATM and some other vendors will will kind of do the opposite and rely primarily on cellular but they always have to complement with something you will not get the coverage required to meet the slas which are more and more stringent you know as we move from Mii 1.0 to 1.5 or 2.0 with more readings more exchanges more B directional communication you have in the for the most coste effective solution and to deliver the SLA you do have to have those hybrid schemes so it's it's not just a technology comparison is how you deploy it and how weightless and for that matter mesh or Laura or those technology you can always deliver the coverage you can throw another getaway where you need to have coverage you can't do that easily with cellular at least not on Commercial bands and that's why a lot of utilities are trending towards private LTE so using cellular for its versatility and its ecosystem and and and and large uh supply chain but deploying and controlling your own network where you can control its configuration how it's operated and you can dedicate it to that use case and in that case cellular is a very valuable option as well so I I totally agree and that's actually why we provide solution in both markets and we uh to Neil's Point as well we actually are going to release a single chip set supporting nbrt and weightless so you can have kind of the best of both walls or you have more flexibility in how you deploy uh and uh that's why we we we like to you know we deploy Wess in licensed band and we make available Cellular in the unlicensed band in the US because those technology are not necessarily that different either and you can have hybrid scheme to to deliver in the end what the customer needs and the customer utility needs their meter reading and they need a very large number of those okay and and lo just to bring you in just to I guess to to to switch back to the cellular story and the story of eim and how that's changing things just just talk around that and specifically if you can talk around there was a question that came in I think you answered but I think it was an interesting question around eim versus IIM and and Keegan's position the suggestion was that you appear to be favoring e in meters is that right can you can you talk around that and justun with e sure so yeah yeah all of this 25% that are using cellular technology I would say I see three waves which happened right the first wave which was just the first generation integrating a cellular modem into a meter and trying to make the best out of it right and learning a cellular works for metering so that was well most of the time in type of concentrator or Gateway uh and so on and then an alternate technology behind uh but then you add maybe a second piece which was the explosion notably in China of nbiot and the so durable Sims and uh and and potentially no so eims really capable of you know managing multiple connectivity profiles and being being updatable pretty much right so that's really the one of of the the core the phase we're in in cellular that is most of the new tenders require clearly a sold dir seam right and then comes the question of do we take the risk of fixed you know connectivity for the lifetime of the product or we really need to bake in uh the multiprofile capability and I think most of the big player are going is withp capability at least for an insurance model right say I can switch if I need to I don't NE want to but I can right and the last step of this Evolution right is the Integra the the the integration of IIM IIM today is mostly what we call single profile that is you you load a specific connectivity at manufacturing and that's the man that's the connectivity for the life of the device but it's already possible to certify an integrated Sim which is multiprofile capable so the so-called iicc by gsma but the standards exist it's all there and you have several supplier and chipset supplier which are on that route sequence SSI and so on um and uh yeah this is the final step I would say so today we the vendors I would say are evaluating this technology but it's not yet in massive you know metering deployment now the deployments are on the eim stage yeah okay thank you loic Neil perhaps I'll bring you in there's a few questions if I can on um there's a few questions on kind of private networks and what's going on I guess in with with cbrs and anter in the US particularly I think Fabian referred to that just just explain uh what that dynamic means with with kind of liberalization of spectrum with private networking opportunities for the metering Market at large presumably most of the activity is around connecting the grid right rather than the meter in the in the property is is that correct just talk around that um yes and no um it's it's a very good question so we see um the emergence of more private networks as this is as this is made possible and of course the benefit of private networks is you you have more control over the configuration of the network over this long period of time and you'll also see the private networks generally operating in the low Spectrum bands which is also very important so in the US they're all to my knowledge they're mostly uh sub gig Spectrum uh and across Europe and in fact a lot of the world now we're seeing the expansion of CDMA not CDMA what am I talking about of um of uh 450 megahertz and yes these are being picked up a lot by utilities for smart grid applications but we also see them uh being uh adopted uh in directly in Smart Meters uh when you look at the Netherlands um yes there's um uh the utilities actually form their own private Network on 450 which they use for both smart metering and the um and the and the grid connectivity so yeah I mean let's see what's going forward there's a lot there's a lot of initiatives especially in the US regarding connecting Smart Meters uh directly to private networks and of course with the eim uh I think lock was just talking about insurance cases well this is kind of quite nice uh this migration from public networks to private networks and back again uh of course if you're on the edge of a public network sorry a private Network then utilizing usim you've got the opportunity to switch devices across different networks as you go forward so I think eim is key to the adoption of private networks as well okay nicely said that that takes care of another question there so thank you thank you Neil faan just to bring you back in just uh NBI unlicensed LTM and unlicensed that is what you're offering isn't it I mean are there devices certified for that you know how close are you with that okay yeah so indeed so that's kind of specific to the North American Market or should I say the FCC region so that that's applicable to Canada or Latin America as well but as of today it's FCC certified so that's for the US only so it's operating a LTM cadm1 base station in the unlicensed band that traditionally has been used by those short range mesh Technologies and and a lot of Technologies actually uh so LTM is compliant to the FCC regulation so you have some technical limitation transmit power so it's one watt Etc but it is able to run there and the beauty of it is that actually it does overlap with band 8 which is one of the most common band I mean it's the traditional GSM band so it does overlap with the 3gpp band 8 which all the modules are capable of supporting so they do not require any change to the software to connect to that LTM base station in the m b it's a three mahz chunk of the unlicensed band very much like the enteric spectrum is a three mahz chunk of the band8 as well so you don't require any any change and that's something we've demonstrated with metor vendors like iton which are using yeah modules from could be sequence could be S could be Tait those modules typically supporting km1 as for nbrt uh no it's not compliant because that's an Nan technology so the technical requirement for FCC and all other regions are different so you cannot operate nvt in this unlicensed band and that's actually why moving forward we are also planning to offer nvt and weightless in the same chipet meaning that you will run nvt when you are on private or public network and potentially being able to move from one to the other indeed using a a Sim with multiple MZ or or eim but also operate an unlicensed band in that case using weightless which has I would say in know nutshell similar capabilities with nvt except it's compliant with unlicensed band regulation yeah okay we've got a few questions coming in I don't think we're going to get to them there's a couple there for you Matt so you might um uh take name and and take them offline a little bit but uh we can come back post after this event to answer any more questions of time is up i' just like to go around a little bit and just to finally you know um you know discuss where how important the meters are because I think they have a bit of a bad rap they've been around a long time but it's it strikes me this is where a lot of excitement is in the iot space Neil perhaps we can go around perh we can start to you is is metering the most important and most exciting Market in iot can we can I ask you that it is for me but it's not the only it's not the only uh exciting uh uh application addressed by iot but it's certainly it's a critical infrastru it's critical industry and it's critical infrastructure which kind of makes it attractive um and if we don't do something then we've got a big problem so the world has to adopt uh the world has to adopt smart metering otherwise our children aren't going to thank us for it so that to me kind of makes it exciting um and the the thing that also uh makes it exciting it is kind of this crossover between the industrial world of smart grids and the consumer world of Smart Homes and so everyone notices it going forward and that's for me what uh what makes it very interesting brilliant Matt can you say something on that I mean that does seem where the that that sentim yeah it's I mean you'd argue that other sectors are more important for certain things from revenue perspective the automotive sector might be uh might be more important to you or consumer electronics if you're a hardware manufacturer um I'm assisted but from a sustainability perspective there are a few things that can compete um so I'd say generally it's it's one of the more important iot sectors across the board in any way of viewing at it viewing it really even from like a life saving perspective as well right so in a lot of countries theft of electricity is quite important you know monitoring the usage of electricity and stopping people from perhaps doing things they shouldn't be with Mains electricity it's all part of that so it's it's important in all manner of sectors and um well sometimes quantity has a quality all of its own doesn't it right so I think from an interest point of view it's it's very interesting from an analyst perspective to look at the market seeing these huge billion dollar contracts change hands and millions and millions of smart is being deployed in different countries yeah and Fabian just uh just quickly I mean there's lot lots to Lots we haven't discussed in this session the report will hopefully expand on some of this but Fabian just as well for you I mean it seems to me that you are you've kind of struck a rich seam of innovation in this market just you know how do you VI what's your what's your sense of it in terms of its importance and excitement yeah I agree with what has been said I think that's uh actually increased in criticality you know we've we've kind of Taken access to energy as a given maybe for some time now it's really on the map and we know we need to manage that optimize it so it's it's becoming more and more critical so in that sense that's getting more exciting in the sense yes that it's it is becoming very important it's not necessarily the fastest moving industry you know as a vendor trying to uh to actually sell products and bring Innovation to that market there are challenges because yeah it's you know traditional utility companies might not be the fastest moving uh but we we we try to excite them with new innovation and new ways to do things uh so it is still exciting as well brilliant and lo last word to you on this this m this this market and and I guess I guess the meaning of it for for the eim revolution as well can you can you put it in words for us yeah yeah so yeah I would underline Neil did touch on that already but for example scarcity of resour and water I think water match made the point of this is the fastest going all of the three I would say in terms of number of units and I think access to water will be critical and we can help with our consumption habits there and to maybe also complement a bit Fabian point on Innovation I think yeah there is it's it's a it's a sector which I think is ready for some disruption uh right in the way you know energy is distributed shared consumed umed right so one example I have is a collaboration we had with energy web which is about a Marketplace a global marketplace where you know energy suppliers producers where whereas you're big or small or an individual producer can have a Marketplace to share and exchange you know access to resources right and and and use security uh to toh to have secure transaction and a place where they can do that efficiently right and I think that's a market which should start to look at this type of innovation to already uh optimize the the sharing notably and the usage brilliant thank you everybody look I'm sorry that we I didn't get to more questions I assure you that most of them if not all of them will be answered in the report out in a couple of weeks um it's a fascinating discussion there is a lot to it um and I really appreciate your time uh but for now thank you uh Neil from t Centurion Fabian from uh ubic Matt from Transformer insights and lock from Keegan thank you so much for your patience and your time and uh um thank you all for tuning in and we look forward to seeing you again thank you bye thank you thank you thank you byebye

2023-12-27 04:33

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