Connexin’s LoRaWAN Wireless Network to Connect Northumbrian Water Meters
Fixed wireless and UK broadband provider Connexin UK has signed a new deal that will see their Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) being expanded to connect up to 900,000 of Northumbrian Water‘s smart meters across the North East, which is something they’ve already done in other parts of the country.
Fixed wireless LoRa networks harness only a small slice of lower frequency radio spectrum (usually in one of the sub-1GHz bands like 868MHz or 915MHz) in order to support relatively slow, but extremely low power, data connections. Such networks tend to run at sub-Megabit speeds (often under 0.05Mbps, but some variants can handle several Megabits), which makes them ideal for linking Internet of Things (IoT) style sensors.
Connexin has already supported a number of other advanced meter infrastructure (AMI) deployment projects, such as with Yorkshire Water. Not to mention their recent agreement with NWL to install over 1 million smart water meters across the South of England for Essex and Suffolk Water.
Advertisement
The latest agreement means that Connexin will provide connectivity to over 330,000 LoRaWAN-enabled water meters for Northumbrian Water by the end of 2029, with a forecast that rises to over 900,000 meters over the 15-year contract.
Gary Adams, Head of Smart Programme at Northumbrian Water, said:
“We are delighted to start our smart water partnership with Connexin in the North East of England to create a smarter, more connected, sustainable future. The new communications network will enable us to capture real-time data across the region and help us to identify and fix leaks faster than ever before, to reduce waste and safeguard our environment.”
The new network will support Northumbrian Water to identify household and network leakage quickly and effectively, reducing the amount of water wasted across the region, and it will also provide households with remote access to hourly water meter readings. The agreement is the fourth major smart water meter contract win for Connexin after Yorkshire Water, Severn Trent Water and Essex and Suffolk Water.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
« EE UK TV Customers Get Eurosport’s Olympics Coverage for Free
KCOM Expands FTTP Broadband Network into 2 New Villages »
Latest UK ISP News
- FTTP (6053)
- BT (3649)
- Politics (2729)
- Business (2444)
- Openreach (2412)
- Building Digital UK (2336)
- Mobile Broadband (2157)
- FTTC (2086)
- Statistics (1914)
- 4G (1827)
- Virgin Media (1776)
- Ofcom Regulation (1591)
- Fibre Optic (1471)
- Wireless Internet (1464)
- 5G (1417)
This looks interesting. I presume that after the challenges of SMETS, the scope includes proper device management and updating of firmware?
It would be interesting to see the performance characteristics, notably of things like devices going offline/coming back as this were the areas that killed the commercials of remote metering models from a decade+ ago.
So where are these meters being installed, in the houses or along the pipes? Are they there to measure end users’ usage and bill them for this, or for company internal statistics? Is that a thing in Northumbria alone or in other places too? Is that a plan for everyone in the UK to have a water meter?
In some areas of South Yorkshire at least Connexin have contacted some homeowners to ask if they can install a LoRaWAN gateway on their roof/chimney, in exchange for £300 per year to cover electricity costs etc (I think they estimate they’d use about £50 of electricity per year).
That’s not to say they aren’t being installed elsewhere however.
The meters will be for each person, I presume, so will go where the stop cock is in the road or in the house. I don;lt know if Northumbrian Water is going to force these meters onto people, like Thames water and others are doing. If they are doing it to monitor leaks and other stuff then I presume they will at some point.
Welsh Water, which is what I use, don’t seem to have any plans for smart water meters.
@kekkle ended up here as I’ve noticed a few new telegraph polls with antennas on across Barnsley. These are those!
One in Royston on Lee Lane and near the royal. Pub at darton!
Hopefully works better than the Arqiva network, where they have applied a one solution fits all, without an alternative where the signal is unusable.
Water meters here are voluntary, thank goodness and are mechanical, no smart water meters here, and I doubt they ever will be. again, thank goodness.
I do have a water meter myself., my choice
What happens if Conexin goes belly up?
It’s LoRaWAN so it’s an established standard, so someone else can just come along and provide the service instead.
In the meantime, someone would just come along and read the meters the old-fashioned way.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you already have a “smart” meter and you don’t know it.
Both my previous meters (Seven Trent) are “EverBlu” – and can report over 433 mhz.
A quick search and you’ll find “rtl_433” components used to ‘listen’ to the signal which you can then pick up for yourself for monitoring (e.g. Home Assistant)
Not sure why they’re paying ‘000s to incentive rollout when there’s pretty much national coverage through community/publicly owned networks such as The Things Network and Helium (coverage map: https://explorer.helium.com/).
Thames Water are fitting smart meters now, but they don’t have a network to send the data back to yet (at least in my area of London). Water companies/the governm would be much better off with a nationwide scheme to save on costs (much like smart electric meters).