The City of Auburn, Ind., has selected Tantalus to provide its Smart Grid communications backbone.

Tantalus is a premier provider of real-time Smart Grid communications Smart Grid communications technology that enables electric, gas & water utilities to optimize the use resources.

Company officials said that the City of Auburn's plans for an evolvable, fully automated metering solution will be fully supported by Tantalus' technology.

“The City of Auburn is exactly the type of smart, forward-looking municipal utility that characterizes Tantalus’ sweet spot,” said Tantalus CEO Eric Murray.

“They completely grasped the core of our value proposition: a communications system that can address current needs robustly and later provide the ability to easily expand, migrate and interoperate.”

In 1985, the forward-thinking Northeast Indiana municipality proved its foresight by installing fiber optic communications.

The City of Auburn recently sought an advanced metering infrastructure solution that would best leverage an existing Fiber-to-the-Home deployment. The municipal utility also needed control over water infrastructure, therefore the multi-commodity approach of Tantalus turned to be the perfect fit.

“Tantalus is a forward thinking company, just like the City of Auburn, and the fact that we can add applications over the years to come is a big factor that grabbed our attention,” said Stuart Tuttle, City of Auburn's Superintendent, in a press release. “We don’t want to have to change our AMI system any time soon.”

To ensure that the FTTH project is completed and accessible to all, even those who opt in at a later date, the City of Auburn will put an Optical Network Terminal on virtually every home.

In related news, the City of Fulton, Missouri selected Tantalus to provide the communications backbone for its Smart Grid. Fulton’s deployment of the technology is funded by a Department of Energy grant that carries strict performance requirements. Tantalus was selected based on a number of criteria including its ability to manage real time data communications.

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