- Combined utilities in the US generate approximately $370 billion in annual sales, making it one of the most important and visible verticals in the IoT. Bringing the industry into the 21st century is essential, with AT&T being an important enabler.
- However, utilities lose between one half and 1% of revenue to unpaid bills that are typically written off. This translates to $1 billion.
- AT&T has also been a pioneer in developing cellular reference designs for smart grid devices. In 2013, AT&T formed a global partnership with GE that led to the development of smart grid devices for smart meters and IoT devices for smart city applications.
- To make it easy to support prepaid energy, AT&T Cellular Reference Design for GE residential electric meters means that they are already prepay-enabled
- One of the more successful approaches to date has been to implement power curtailment measures by modernizing the existing metering infrastructure. Investment in smart meters has produced a growing market for promoting sustainability initiatives in which companies such as AT&T are playing an important role as an enabler through its wireless offerings.
- The AT&T M2X Data Service is another example of enabling of future technologies consisting of a managed service for developers aimed at advancing IoT applications. This cloud-based data store lets enterprises collect, analyze, and share data that can be tracked over a period of time from connected devices. For the utilities vertical, this is an important tool for enhancing edge computing to the grid, allowing for the decentralized rectification of issues around outage management.
