David Burns (Telstra)
Telstra is gearing up to provide up to 4.1 million internet of things (IoT) SIMs to Intellihub as part of a $100 million deal with the smart utility infrastructure company.
Founded in 2018, and with operations in Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ), Intellihub provides smart metering services across the A/NZ market by engaging with energy retailers to provide all aspects of their energy control and management end customers.
It is understood that the agreement with Intellihub represents Telstra’s largest ever IoT deal in terms of value and the number of connected devices involved in the arrangement.
Telstra claims to have just ticked over 5 million devices now connected to its IoT network, with the 4 million-plus IoT SIMs to be provided over the next decade as part of the Intellihub deal set to nearly double the number of devices connected to Telstra’s IoT network.
According to David Burns, Telstra Enterprise group executive, by using the Cisco Jasper platform, the IoT SIMs will be incorporated into Intellihub’s smart meters to deliver real-time monitoring and insights to help the smart utility infrastructure company and its customers better manage things like energy demand, solar feed-ins and peaks and troughs.
“This solution demonstrates the power of Telstra IoT in finding real-world solutions and will enable Intellihub’s smart meters to get even smarter, providing Intellihub and its customers with deeper, real-time insights to manage the different elements of the energy network,” Burns said.
“The deal also provides Intellihub with price certainty for the next 10 years – key for its next phase of growth.
“We’ve already hit the ground running with around half a million Intellihub smart meters connected to the Telstra IoT network so far,” he added.
In Australia, Telstra claims around 4 million square kilometres of narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) coverage and around 3 million square kilometres of LTE-M coverage.
Leveraging its mobile network infrastructure, the telco’s Cellular Low Power Wide Area Networks (Cellular LPWANs) are built specifically for scaled IoT deployments to provide cost-efficient coverage.
The company claims more than 50,000 devices are being connected to its IoT network every month, with around 1.2 million devices connected to a Telstra LPWAN to date.
Telstra is no newcomer to employing IoT technology for utility metering. In 2018, the telco revealed a year-long trial of its Digital Water Metering IoT solution aimed at helping to identify and prevent water wastage and focus on water saving measures.
