Smart Water

The opportunity for a water utility to leverage wireless technology to transform its operations, reduce costs and drive new revenue streams is enormous by enabling the cost-effective collection and analysis of data from across the service area. In addition to supporting applications such as automated meter reading, remote leak detection and water quality monitoring, wireless networks can also provide both consumer and enterprise customers with the actionable data needed to monitor and control water use. These innovative applications are just the beginning as utilities and their partners discover new ways to optimize water assets.

However, the large geographic areas over which water utility assets are distributed along with the sheer number of potential endpoints create enormous challenges for any wireless network. These challenges are compounded by the large number of underground assets as well as the requirement that many applications operate in the field for 20 years on battery power alone. Finally, the wireless network must also support the business case for the application and therefore fall within defined capital and operational cost parameters which are constantly under pressure with competing infrastructure demands.

On-Ramp’s Ultra-Link Processing™ (“ULP”) system provides water utilities with a strategic wireless communications platform that dramatically improves the ROI for current sensor and metering applications, while offering the flexibility and scalability to add future applications without a substantial investment in additional network infrastructure.

Listed beloware some of the system benefits:

• Signal Robustness – ULP can cover a mixed urban, suburban and rural area of over 4,000 square miles with only 40 access points. The system can also reach endpoints located up to 24” under manhole covers from several miles away.
• Capacity – ULP’s unique multiple access scheme allows each access point to communicate with 1,000 endpoints simultaneously and hence can easily support more than 20,000 water meters or sensors per access point.
• Power Requirements – The system is specifically designed for low power operation and can support a battery life of 20+ years for most low duty cycle metering and sensor applications.
• Latency – The system supports an average latency measured in the tens of seconds, superior to legacy narrowband licensed spectrum systems which can take minutes to hours.
• Security & Reliability – The system can operate using NIST approved security protocols. Additionally, the system is highly resilient to interference and hence can operate in dense urban areas and other environment with significant competing wireless traffic in unlicensed spectrum.
• Cost – The signal robustness and capacity of the system result in very low infrastructure requirements for the system, which translate into low deployment and maintenance costs for the network. Additionally, the system is designed to operate in free spectrum and hence there are no spectrum licensing costs associated with the system.