Water AMI innovation with Amazon Sidewalk

Texas-based water management platform provider Subeca has launched an Amazon Sidewalk-based solution as a low-cost AMI option for water metering in the US.

The solution, believed to be the first to use Amazon Sidewalk for data communication, is comprised of the Subeca ‘Pin’ as a Bluetooth meter register to replace the standard register on the water meter.

Once commissioned, the utility is then able to utilise the Amazon Sidewalk communications network, with the free communications benefit that it offers.

“This is a very inexpensive way for a utility to start building out an AMI platform,” says Patrick Keaney, CEO of Subeca.

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Subeca’s Pin is claimed to work with the majority of existing water meters and that it can be retrofitted in less than a minute.

To get the product out on the market the company has launched an ‘Explorer kit’ comprised of three Pins and the use of its Engage data platform for one year, available to 100 utilities.

Amazon Sidewalk is a long-range, low-bandwidth, low-power community wireless network for IoT that is enabled on Amazon Echo and certain other devices.

It is based on Bluetooth low energy and 900MHz LoRa and is believed to potentially provide coverage to over 90% of the population in the US – its only country of availability so far.

Subeca’s Pin includes the Bluetooth meter register as the core data collection component and the Bluetooth low energy and LoRa modules.

The company’s product offering also includes the ‘Act’, a Bluetooth wireless ball valve that will open, restrict or close upon command from a Bluetooth-capable mobile device or through the company’s Link data collection device.

Subeca has previously developed a LoRaWAN solution with a Pin featuring AWS IoT Core for low-cost communication.

Keaney, who has been CEO of Subeca since May, is the former worldwide head of development at AWS Water, with a focus on the development of IoT and cloud services in the water sector.