The Internet of Things gives cities powerful new tools for saving money and operating more efficiently. These innovative, intelligent solutions build more livable cities today, as well as a powerful bridge to the future.
Smart city case study: Mueller Water Products
Working together with IBM and Mueller Water Products, AT&T is developing a solution that makes it possible to detect leaks in water mains. The three companies came together after the federal government issued an invitation for companies to showcase their smart city solutions.
This proof of concept is now a commercialised smart water solution for large companies, municipalities, or even water parks – leveraging acoustic technology provided by Mueller Water Products.
Acoustic sensors placed along the pipes trigger alarms when they sense sound changes that may indicate leaks. The AT&T 4G LTE network carries the sensor information to computing resources running a water management application from IBM.
Although the range of our IoT solutions continues to expand and evolve, the purpose for creating them remains the same: to help businesses streamline processes, reduce costs, be more productive, and create new products and lines of business.
Mobeen Khan
AT&T, AVP IoT Strategy and Product Management
AT&T and the Smart Grid – an insight into best practice enablers in the U.S. utility sector
- Combined utilities in the U.S. generate approximately $370 billion in annual sales, making it one of the most important and visible verticals in the IoT. Bringing the industry into the 21st century is essential, with AT&T being an important enabler.
- However, utilities lose between one half and 1% of revenue to unpaid bills that are typically written off. This translates to $1 billion.
- AT&T has also been a pioneer in developing cellular reference designs for smart grid devices. In 2013, AT&T formed a global partnership with GE that led to the development of smart grid devices for smart meters and IoT devices for smart city applications.
- To make it easy to support prepaid energy, AT&T’s Cellular Reference Design for GE residential electric meters means that they are already prepay-enabled.
- One of the more successful approaches to date has been to implement power curtailment measures by modernising the existing metering infrastructure. Investment in smart meters has produced a growing market for promoting sustainability initiatives in which companies such as AT&T are playing an important role as an enabler through its wireless offerings.
- The AT&T M2X Data Service is another example of enabling of future technologies consisting of a managed service for developers aimed at advancing IoT applications. This cloud-based data store lets enterprises collect, analyse, and share data that can be tracked over a period of time from connected devices. For the utilities vertical, this is an important tool for enhancing edge computing to the grid, allowing for the decentralised rectification of issues around outage management.
