Telstra has teamed up with Software AG to use Software AG’s Cumulocity IoT platform as the basis for a complete system to enable water utilities to gather and analyse information from digital water meters and other components of their infrastructure. The system is being trialled with Busselton Water in Western Australia.
Busselton Water serves around 26,000 customers in Busselton and surrounding communities including Port Geographe, Siesta Park, Vasse and Wonnerup, an area of around 690,000 hectares.
The system collects water pressure and flow data and feeds these into Telstra’s instance of the Cumulocity IoT platform and Cumulocity IoT Accelerator for water utilities.
Telstra has partnered with an Australian company to manufacture the digital water meters, which will communicate over Telstra’s NB-IoT network.
Telstra declined to name the company. However Australian meter manufacturer Group claimed to have launched “the first commercially available NB-IoT ready, fully integrated, ultrasonic smart water meter” in January 2018 and announced in December that it was being used by Bundaberg Regional Council over the Telstra NB-IoT network.
Software AG describes Cumulocity IoT Accelerators as industry specific bundles of prepackaged features, plugins and configurations that include enhanced features to simplify and secure connection to devices, to automate the creation of visualisations and to commission new end customers.
Telstra targets intelligent utilities
Telstra says it intends to offer the system as a service to water utilities around Australia either stand-alone or as part of a larger “IoT for Intelligent Utilities” package that incorporates business rules, off-the-shelf tools for monitoring and managing the data, and dashboards that provide users with near real-time information on the state of the system.
Telstra executive for global IoT solutions, Gerhard Loots, told IoT Australia Telstra’s IoT for Intelligent Utilities would allow water utilities to better interpret and use the data they receive from their digital meter sensors, save water, improve services and drive real business outcomes.
He said Telstra aimed to show Busselton Water that by digitising the water infrastructure and measuring flow and pressure, it could gain a number of benefits on a number of layers, including customer experience. “But the real savings will come from managing the supply of water … Across utilities non-billable water is between 10 and 20 percent,” he said.
“What we are doing is taking something that is extremely analogue and putting measurements around it so they can start analysing it.”
Loots said NB-IoT was a key technology for water utilities because Telstra’s network covers a large area, and the technology is able to provide coverage in underground locations where water meters are often located.
“At the Telstra Vantage event in Melbourne we demonstrated NB-IoT penetrating five metres underground in the CBD,” he said. “It is low power so devices can operate from batteries. That is very important for water utilities.”
Carrier grade IoT platform delivery
Cumulocity, Loots said, was one of a number of IoT platforms operated by Telstra, and it had been implemented so as to provide carrier-grade reliability. “We are running it in three separate data centres across Australia to provide redundancy.”
One of the benefits of Cumulocity, Loots said, “Is that it is data ingestion layer that allows you to collect all the data points into the platform but then allows you to build an application specific to each customer.
“We have all the elements and APIs to build a system that enables customers to see the data the way they want, and that information is able to be fed into other systems, such as ARP systems.
“And we make these APIs available to our customer in ways that are simple and secure.”
Loots said Telstra was also serving the connected vehicle sector and asset tracking. In February 2018 Telstra CEO Andy Penn announced that trucking company Linfox had selected Telstra and subsidiary MTData as strategic partners to “implement advanced telematics solutions that will provide leading edge, actionable data in their transport logistics.”
Telstra targeting ‘smart spaces’
Over the next 12 months he said Telstra was looking to extend its IoT into smart spaces. “A building sits inside a precinct; a precinct sits inside a city. So we are focussing on that area which is quite diverse but which in essence uses the same underlying data sets.”
Cumulocity: a brief history
Germany based Software AG acquired Cumulocity, a company also based in Germany, in March 2017 and brought the Cumulocity IoT platform to Australia in March 2018 following release of a new version.
However, Telstra’s use of the platform predates that. In a note posted on its web site in late 2016 Telstra said it had chosen to partner with Cumulocity because it was an “award winning IoT platform provider (Frost and Sullivan) that has been rated as the most open and developer friendly (MachNation) across many players in the IoT platform market.”
In November 2018 Software AG expanded the capabilities of Cumulocity by enabling its WebMethods’ Dynamic Apps low-code app development platform to be used for development of apps running on Cumulocity.
