Telstra and Intellihub seal AU$100 million smart meter deal

Telstra and Intellihub have signed a 10-year AU$100 million agreement that will see the latter have its smart meters on the former’s mobile network.

The telco said the deal was its largest involving the internet of things.

“Using the Cisco Jasper platform, the IoT SIMs will be incorporated into Intellihub’s smart meters to deliver real-time monitoring and insights to help Intellihub and its customers better manage things like energy demand, solar feed-ins, and peaks and troughs,” Telstra Enterprise group executive David Burns said.

“Intellihub was founded four years ago and has grown significantly with more than 1 million meters installed and around 1,000 new meters going in every day. Our IoT SIM will be soldered into each device at the point of manufacture.”

Telstra added it already has approximately 500,000 Intellihub smart meters on its network, and in total had over five million IoT devices connected, with 1.2 million on its LPWAN network. The telco said it currently has around four million square kilometres of NB-IoT coverage, and three million square kilometres of LTE-M coverage.

For its part, Intellihub said the deal would allow for around four million connected devices, and would help it support its 40 electricity retail customers.

The meter provider also said it has been selected as a “key metering supplier” for Telstra Energy, and it would be providing its Intelli-M smart meter and Intelli-ConX communications bridge.

“We have more than 1.2 million smart meters under management across Australia and New Zealand, and a significant pipeline over the next decade,” Intellihub CEO Wes Ballantine said.

Speaking in November, Telstra Energy chief Ben Burge said the telco would be taking a measured approach to entering energy market this year.

Having gained authorisation to operate in New South Wales, Queensland, and South Australia, Telstra will begin signing up some of its employees as customers on a test basis, before the public can sign up by the end of this fiscal year.

Burge said the telco had previously used its standby power assets in its telecommunication infrastructure to stabilise the grid and address market shortages.

Elsewhere on Monday, TPG Telecom has signed an agreement with Nokia to deploy private 4G and 5G mobile networks for the mining sector.

“As our industries adopt transformative technologies like automation and virtualisation, it’s essential to have smart, fast, sustainable and resilient private network solutions supporting their operations,” Nokia Oceania head Anna Perrin said.

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