Indian telecommunications provider Bharti Airtel has teamed up with Secure Meters to deploy 1.3 million smart meters in the Indian state of Bihar. The smart meters will use NB-IoT services, marking a first in the country for the tech’s deployment with a fall-back option to ensure continuous connectivity.
The Indian telecom provider yesterday announced the partnership with smart metering company Secure Meters to deploy Narrow Band (NB-IoT) services that will power 1.3 million homes in Bihar through a smart meter solution.
According to Airtel, this will be the country’s first NB-IoT solution on a narrow band with a fall-back option that will work on 2G and 4G, aiming to ensure real-time connectivity and uninterrupted transfer of critical data.
NB-IoT is a low-power, wide area, radio network technology developed by 3GPP which enables a wide variety of IoT devices and services including smart meters.
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According to Airtel, their NB-IoT platform is future-ready and scalable to 5G. Their proposition also includes an advanced IoT platform ‘The Airtel IoT Hub’ which has been customised to suit the needs of Advance Metering Infrastructure Service Providers (AMISPs) and includes a Feasibility Tool to help AMISPs plan their meter deployments.
Other functionalities, states the telecom provider, include customer life cycle management and advanced analytics tools like diagnostics, live sessions check and real-time data usage among others.
Airtel touts its network as ready for pan India NB-IoT deployment and designed for superior coverage to address the specific needs of the IoT market.
Ananya Singhal, joint managing director of Secure Meters, said: “We are thrilled to have partnered with Airtel for the implementation of NB-IoT services in our smart meter rollout in North Bihar.
“With Airtel’s support, we were able to seamlessly connect and monitor our meters, resulting in greater efficiency and cost savings for Secure and for our customers in North Bihar…We highly recommend Airtel to anyone looking to implement NB-IoT services in their IoT solutions and look forward to a growing partnership.”
