Sep. 9, 2009 (Business Wire) -- Echelon Corporation (NASDAQ:ELON) announced today the introduction of an IP-based smart meter for the North American market that brings IP connectivity inside a meter for smart grid metering systems. The new meter is a powerful, intelligent end-point for the smart grid and an integral part of Echelon’s enhancements to its Networked Energy Services (NES) smart metering infrastructure.
The new NES Smart IP Meters combine three key elements of an intelligent grid infrastructure in a single ANSI standard-based meter – IP-based wide-area network (WAN) connection, extremely reliable power line-based communications, and neighborhood meter network management. The new meters can increase a utility’s installation flexibility and lower cost by allowing them to locate the backhaul connection for each neighborhood at the side of a single home.
“IP-based meters are an integral part of our strategy to keep the NES System at least a generation ahead of other solutions,” said Jim Andrus, Echelon’s vice president of North American Sales, NES Products. “The IP meter provides increased connectivity and deployment options, which gives utilities new ways to drive down deployment and lifecycle costs. The combination of open IP communications with embedded grid intelligence offers utilities the ability to move beyond basic advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and onto the smart grid.”
The NES System embeds communications and intelligence directly into the power grid itself, enabling utilities to use a single network for electricity and communications. By leveraging the utility’s existing assets it eliminates the burden and on-going cost of AMI systems that bypass the grid and require utilities to install and maintain a redundant and costly RF network solely dedicated to communications.
With the NES System, backhaul providers such as T-Mobile North America supply and maintain the backhaul network and the meters utilize the existing low voltage power lines to provide high speed, reliable and secure neighborhood communications with no new network build-out. The new IP meters have an open interface designed to accept any IP-capable WAN card, such as GPRS, UMTS, LTE, CDMA, EV-DO, WiMAX®, fiber optic, DSL, and Wi-Fi® – giving utilities the ability to work with any mobile carrier or WAN service provider in North America.
The powerful data concentrator built into the NES Smart IP Meter serves as the intelligent hub for the neighborhood meter network by providing management services, including meter and smart device discovery, mesh communications management, and operations monitoring.
“Many ‘smart meters’ and AMI systems on the market are still focused around the meter simply generating billing data, a limited role that it has played for the last century.
