Smart Meters

For cities seeking better ways to manage water resources, smart meters and smart water sensors can provide a wealth of intelligence to help conserve resources, prevent leaks, maintain infrastructure and manage demand more effectively.

Like other smart city technologies, smart water management relies on data produced by smart meters and smart sensors to monitor real-time conditions and consumption, enabling utility officials to respond to issues quickly and to predict future demand effectively.

Smart meters differ from traditional water meters in two ways: they not only record the amount of water consumed but the time of consumption as well, and they can communicate with the water utility via network connections rather than requiring a meter reader to physically visit a property. As a result, cities get data on consumption at homes and businesses in nearly real time, rather than once every one or two months. Consequently, water utility officials can more effectively monitor consumption, predict demand, identify leaks, regulate supply and optimize pumping operations to reduce energy consumption.

In addition to data from smart meters, smart water systems collect data from sensors placed throughout the water distribution infrastructure to monitor pressure, flow, vibration, temperature and water quality, as well as weather events that could lead to potential flooding. Armed with this information as well as data from smart meters, cities can:

• Prevent water shortages by more accurately forecasting demand and minimizing non-revenue water loss due to leaks or theft.
• Minimize stress on distribution networks through adequate planning.
• Ensure water quality by proactively monitoring levels of bacteria and pathogens in water supplies.
• Perform predictive maintenance on water utility infrastructure to extend the lifecycle of assets and to minimize unplanned outages.
• Reduce overhead costs by eliminating manual meter reads and by improving efficiency of water management in other ways.

The basics of smart meter and smart water management technology.

Smart water metering and smart city water programs rely on the same types of technologies as other smart city initiatives like smart traffic management, smart streetlights and smart electric grids. These include:

• Smart meters – digital devices that measure consumption on an ongoing basis and communicate directly with city data management platforms.
• Smart sensors – low-cost Internet of Things (IoT) devices that provide a wealth of data on every aspect of water utility infrastructure and water distribution networks.
• Network connections to transmit data from sensors to data management platforms in the cloud.
• Data analytics software that converts raw data into actionable intelligence and communicates findings to water utility officials in the form of alerts, dashboards, reports and analyses.

Spectrum Enterprise: connecting smart meters to data analytics platforms

A high-performance, high-bandwidth network is an essential technology for a smart water grid and other smart city initiatives. To enable cities to connect smart meters and smart sensors with the software and technology that will aggregate the data they produce, Spectrum Enterprise provides a foundation of connectivity that includes more than 840,000 miles of fiber connections nationwide. As a partner to smart cities throughout the U.S., Spectrum also offers:

• Symmetrical connection speeds up to 100 Gbps for local governments, institutions and enterprises.
• WiFi connectivity through more than 350,000 hotspots nationwide which will soon add 5G and 802.11ax technology for wireless connection speeds up to 1 Gbps.
• Cellular connectivity through Spectrum Mobile – one of the country’s largest LTE cellular networks.
• Gigabit connections for homes and businesses, providing the connectivity to connect smart meters back to city analytics platforms.

Learn more about Spectrum Smart Cities at www.spectrumsmartcities.com.