Telenor Bulgaria released Smart Monitoring, a new platform that can be used by companies to remotely check the metering of electricity, water, heat energy, and gas usage, as well as to get notifications on unusual usage. The service also allows companies to discover leakages or atypical usage of their water supply systems and to track high or low pressure in heating systems.
Thanks to the real-time data access, customers can pinpoint the location of failures in their systems. The service is designed to help companies prevent financial losses and speed up the meter-reading processes, the operator said in a press release.
The service’s installation is accomplished by adding a data recording device to one or more existing electricity meters, water meters, heat meters or gas flow meters. The devices work by sending data from the metering devices to a special platform through the GSM network. These come with a battery that can work between 5 and 10 years and allows remote electricity management. The devices are CE certified lower power data loggers supporting GSM and NBIoT (narrowband IoT) data transmission technologies.
The service by Telenor is offered with two-year subscription plans which include the mobile data usage needed for its operation and the price of the device.
Tarifica’s Take
This smart monitoring service appears to be a very good offer in that it provides functionalities that add significant convenience to companies’ business without introducing very many complexities. The platform appears to be a relatively seamless solution, and unlike many IoT offerings currently being deployed, it does not depend on 5G.
Monitoring of mundane but essential services such as utilities is very helpful to companies in keeping their expenses down and reducing waste and inefficiency. As such it has broad appeal and therefore constitutes an excellent revenue opportunity for the mobile operator. Smart Monitor enables Telenor to provide value-added services to business clients, and indeed to acquire clients for this purpose alone that may not be subscribers to the operator’s regular business plans.
Of course, the operator will also derive revenue from the data used. The fact that this type of IoT service works very well on existing traditional networks and does not require the latest high-speed connectivity speaks well for its ease of marketability and sales. While cutting-edge technologies are coming on fast, they are expensive and by no means always necessary. There is plenty of room in the IoT space for simpler solutions that cost less.