Water & Wastewater Asia September/October 2019

8 | MARKET REPORT
Looking
beyond the
Internet of
Things: NB-IoT
Metasphere has successfully trialled its Point Orange IoT
RTUs in Australia and New Zealand
The delicate art of conservation has
never been more important for one
of our most precious resources
– water. We can’t live without it, but as
climate change’s perfect storm gathers –
rising urban populations; falling supplies of
unadulterated fresh water – we must work
out how to make the most of every last drop.
For many countries, cities and remote areas
right across the continent of Asia, water and
wastewater management are now absolute
top priorities. As Patrick Decker, president &
CEO of Xylem, recently said, “These urgent
threats are not some far-off problem in the
future… We need step-change, and digital
innovation is the answer.”
With our unquenchable thirst for water,
we’ve shaped our own civilisations around
its outlets – rivers, lakes, wells, natural
springs – and used our genius and ingenuity
to dispose of, treat and re-use wastewater
ever more effectively. We’ve dug and drilled
wells, laid pipes, gouged out canals, sucked
and siphoned it out of every little and big
hole over the millennia – for drinking,
transporting, washing, diluting, draining
and all water’s myriad other purposes. But
the 21 st -century art of water conservation
and management is unrecognisable from
the past, as revolutionary technology’s
shockwaves reverberate through this ancient
human endeavour.
The high-tech revolution can be found in
the now-ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT),
whose ‘smart’ fingertips are setting every
conceivable ‘thing’ aglow with connectivity,
from ‘smart’ meters to vending machines to
cattle to toilets to pet-tracking to… Well,
you name it.
And the recent accelerative thrust behind
the IoT revolution is provided by the Narrow-
Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT), with the
Asia-Pacific region (APAC) in the NB-IoT
vanguard. APAC is the largest regional IoT
market in the world, and by 2025 it will
account for the highest number of Mobile IoT
connections – more than one billion of the
world’s 1.9 billion, according to GSMA, the
organisation representing mobile operators
worldwide.
What exactly is NB-IoT? It is a form of
Low-Power-Wide-Area-Network (LPWAN)
technology developed to enable a wide
range of new IoT devices and services.
For the first time, NB-IoT offers significant
improvements in the power consumption of
user devices, system capacity and spectrum
efficiency, allowing low-power devices to
be linked wirelessly in a network, efficiently
connecting sensors that can be installed in
remote and hitherto inaccessible places.
Using NB-IoT can considerably extend the
Water & Wastewater Asia • September / October 2019