The good, the bad and the unknown: 6 key learnings from working with NB-IoT, part I
by Gerben Kuijpers
by Gerben Kuijpers
As we’ve previously stated, NB-IoT is definitely a contender for the communications technology of the future in the realm of smart electricity metering. That said, we have seen an unjust inflation of expectations for its merits in recent years. There is simply a mismatch between the specs on slideware and the performance that can be obtained for real-life use cases with many devices. Utilities can easily get the impression that NB-IoT is the answer, no matter what the question is, but reality is – as reality tends to be – a lot more nuanced.
At Kamstrup, we started working on our NB-IoT solution for smart electricity metering in the summer of 2017. Since then, a series of lab tests and trials based on typical electricity meter scenarios have given us the experience and knowledge we have today and continue to build on.
We developed an NB-IoT plug-in module for our OMNIPOWER electricity meter in the autumn of 2017 and today, there are more than 100 NB-IoT enabled meters deployed as trials in live networks in seven countries across Europe.
One deployment involves 50 meters in cooperation with a major international mobile network operator. Meters were installed in and around a large European city in carefully selected locations, including the homes of some of the operator’s employees. This makes up a very realistic environment for metering use cases and as a result, the data we get is highly relevant. The meters are connected to our head-end system, which allows us to collect meter data as well as signal data to learn more about reading performance and the connection quality.
Collecting and interpreting data on how the solution performs in different locations and set-ups enables us to determine the use cases where NB-IoT is ideal and, just as importantly, identify its limitations and the cases where it makes more sense to use one of the other communication technologies available.
Among the next steps is a pilot project with meters used in live operation in Q1 and Q2 of 2019 together with Finnish electricity company Herrfors, and we will of course keep you up to date on the development and new learnings right here on the blog.
1. Basic connectivity is solve
Stable communication is a prerequisite for fulfilling the daily needs of any utility, but in the beginning, just getting an NB-IoT connection established was a challenge. We experienced all kinds of weird behaviour, including chipset crashes, unexplainable loss of data and the need to configure the chipset in different ways for Radio Access Networks (RANs) from different vendors. This resulted in a lot of communication with modem vendors, chipset vendors, mobile network operators and the telecom equipment manufacturers. Over time and after numerous chipset firmware updates and newer versions of the RAN software, the situation slowly improved.
Today, we have reached a level of plug & play, where all that is required is to insert an NB-IoT enabled SIM card and power up the meter. During the last 9 months, no expert involvement has been needed to get the meters to connect to new networks in new countries, so we consider this basic challenge solved.