Spain’s Aqualia to smarten water meters with NB-IoT connectivity

Aqualia has contracted Vodafone to provide NB-IoT connectivity to smarten its meters as part of the digitalisation of its water systems over the next 10 years.

Since the deployment began in October 2022, Vodafone Spain has already connected more than 250,000 meters to its NB-IoT network and the initial target is to complete connections to over 1 million water meters during the first 5 years of the contract.

Aqualia’s goal is to offer remote meter reading and other services to its over 3 million customers in Spain in the coming years.

Daniel Barallat, director of IoT at Vodafone Spain, says the control and management of water use in Spain is a constant and vitally important challenge today.

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“With this contract, we put our most cutting-edge technology at the service of Aqualia to actively contribute to the better conservation of natural resources and more efficient water management.”

The initiative is being undertaken as part of the government’s Strategic Project for Recovery and Economic Transformation (PERTE), which is aimed to modernise the urban water systems to improve efficiency, reduce losses in the distribution systems and improve the wastewater treatment infrastructure.

Vodafone’s Water Meter solution for homes, businesses and public institutions includes the digitalisation of the meters and the reading and analysis of the data.

In a pilot currently underway in the city of Vigo, Aqualia and Vodafone are investigating the use of the remote meter read data for detection of fraudulent activities such as tampering and reverse flow and for leak detection with hourly water balance analyses, with the aim to develop a comprehensive solution.

It is also intended to provide the data to customers to enable them to become aware of their consumption and to use the data for the prediction of consumption patterns to improve water management and broadly make the cycle more sustainable.

For example, with optimised pumping in turn the energy consumption is optimised and stresses on the network reduced, which also should reduce the risk of breakage and leaks and the loss of non-revenue water.

NB-IoT is the preferred communication for water meters in Spain as many are underground or in other outdoor locations.