Market Insight

Direct Cellular Connectivity for Smart Meters

Author: Sam Lucero, Practice Director, M2M & Embedded

Published: 14 Sep 2011

Most utilities in the United States have deployed their advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) projects using either radio frequency (RF) mesh or power line carrier (PLC) connectivity in the neighborhood area network (NAN), connecting clusters of meters to a local data concentrator for backhaul to the utility’s head-end. The key argument for doing this has been cost: RF mesh and PLC have traditionally been seen as less costly to deploy than connecting every meter directly in a point to point (P2P) configuration over a cellular network.

The full text of this Insight is available to subscribers of the M2M Research Service and the Smart Cities Research Service.

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