Next week I will be at the Mobile World Congress (News - Alert) to demonstrate some of the technologies my company, Home Jinni, has developed for connected consumer electronics. I will also be taking this opportunity to speak with pioneers on the cutting edge of the cellular M2M industry, an area which according to the GSMA (News - Alert), is expected to bring connectivity to fifty billion “things” by 2025.

Even though Cellular M2M is quickly being adopted for many applications that need device to device communications, one sector that the established M2M providers and their underlying carriers have failed to gain traction in, is the utility AMI network. The few companies which have successfully partnered with utilities, like SmartSynch with AT&T (News - Alert), have for the most part provided AMI networks for industrial customers.

For vehicle Telematics, mobile M2M is the clear choice; cars are mobile devices after all. But smart meters don’t move around that much; I fully understand why a utility would not adopt a service it can deploy much cheaper by itself. The question I have though is if there is really a need for utilities to build a network infrastructure for the service of AMI. In my opinion, they do not need to waste rate payer’s money on building networks which can only handle remote meter readings, outage monitoring, demand side management and the most basic forms of demand response; these are applications the Internet would be great for.  The arguments for security and fault tolerance are flawed. AMI is certainly no more critical than the consumer facing online banking system and when you are talking about 90 percent accuracies and reading meters in minute cycles, fault tolerance does not become an issue.

The catch is, in the longer run, we will definitely need a private network for the consumer facing the smart grid. This is because it should be about much more than AMI. We hope one day it will live up to the promise of including residential micro-generators and CHP systems, vehicle to grid, a bidirectional energy management interface where the consumer is a true participant in the  energy market and homes which communicate with a decentralized control system. When including these scenarios, unlike AMI, we really will need a private and highly optimized communications network. This network will need to handle true real-time data with the highest accuracy. As this system can have substantial impacts on grid stability, the highest fault tolerance and security measures will be needed. This network will definitely not work with the latencies and bandwidth constraints of current AMI networks.

Truly intelligent networks like this are already a requirement in the grid substation and we are already starting to see it spread to the rest of the distribution and transmission network. With recent news of the Current Group partnering with Verizon and TVA with SmartSynch for networks of this caliber, we might be seeing a hint of even more substantial partnerships to come. I think carriers have realized this is not a market they can afford to loose and we will see them offer services to this sector that make economic sense for all parties involved.  I will revisit this discussion after MWC.