TR Forums

So for a project my other work is doing, we're trying to find out the following:

One or more brands of power meters with GSM/3G/whatever capabilities, to allow for remote monitoring/billing. Anybody know any brands/models, and has any insight on this?

My ex used to work at a company called Itron, and their meters have wireless capability, using the Zigbee protocol. They might have other models that support other types of wireless communication.

https://itron.com/na/productsAndService ... lectricity

Unless you have some concession with your wireless provider, maintaining all those GSM network devices is going to cost a small fortune in fees. If you don't need real-time monitoring, what I'd recommend is to use meters with Zigbee or some other similar rf instrumentation network protocol and concatenate the data at a neighborhood gateway, where the data is then uplinked to the host site. You could use GSM there, if you want.

We do something similar in one of our products, using a 900MHz radio to uplink telemetry data to a gateway device. The gateway can connect to the servers using either CDMA or GSM radios; but, it has an ethernet port if we want to hardwire it to a server. With the right radio, you could conceivably collect data from several square kilometers using one well placed gateway.

Hmmm...I've seen a number of automatic meter-reading systems that used Power Line Carrier. Is something like this what you're after? They have a German office so I assume they support some European standards in addition to their North American solutions.