Reliance Industries Limited is reportedly planning to venture into the smart electricity meter market. The company plans to take advantage of its telecom arm Jio’s expertise to offer meter data collection, communication cards, telecom, and cloud hosting services to discoms, the Mint reported citing two sources familiar with the development.
As per the report, RIL is planning to offer these services through Narrow Band-Internet of Thing (NB-IoT). Jio had in 2018 launched its pan-India NB-IoT network with the help of Samsung, which also powers its pan-India 4G network. This comes against the backdrop of the world’s largest electricity smart meter programme under way in India, with the aim of cutting distribution losses.
India’s programme aims to replace 250 million conventional meters to help raise annual revenues of debt-laden discoms to ₹1.38 trillion.
Some of the advantages that smart meters offer over conventional meters include--minimum human intervention in metering, billing, and collection, and help reduce electricity theft. Smart meters are key to the success of India’s proposed ₹3.5 trillion distribution reform scheme— “Reforms Linked Result Based Scheme for Distribution"—that calls for completing compulsory smart metering ecosystem across the distribution sector starting from electricity feeders to the consumer levels.
“Some of the services on offer by RIL include meter data collection, communication cards, telecom and cloud hosting services," said a person cited above to the publication on the request of anonymity. The development coincides with India’s smart meter program that aims to cut electricity distribution losses and seeks to replace 250 million conventional meters to cut the debt of the industry and raise the annual revenues of the discoms to Rs 1.38 trillion, as per the publication.
According to a recent report by ETTelecom, Jio has created a complete 5G solution, using 100 percent homegrown technologies that will allow it to launch next-generation, high-speed services in India. Having developed end-to-end 5G technology, Jio now wants to bring a wide array of use cases such as security and surveillance using drones, industrial IoT, and digitization in the agriculture sector. (Source: Mint, ETTelecom)
