Taiwanese industrial IoT company Ubiik has for the third year running won the contract to deploy the country’s advanced metering infrastructure (AMI).

The US$19.2m contract came from Taiwan Power Corporation (Taipower) and will again use Ubiik’s Weightless LPWAN technologies to build a dedicated wireless telecommunications network. Weightless LPWAN proved to be the most scalable and cost-effective method among the proposals.

In 2017, Taipower launched an ambitious plan to deploy six million smart electricity meters in Taiwan by 2030 to reduce the reliance on manual meter reading. More importantly, digitalising the metering operation paves the way to balance the supply and demand for power in the island, especially at a time when the growth of renewable energies and EV infrastructures make the dynamic management of the distribution grid increasingly challenging.

Ubiik is one of the handful of vendors qualified by Taipower – after a yearlong technical selection process including live pilots in 2017 and 2018 – which directly deploy and maintain telecoms networks for the operation of these electricity meters. The business model is a six-year renewable service consisting of Ubiik delivering and maintaining Weightless LPWAN as a dedicated telecommunications network, field area network (FAN) communication modules within Taipower’s new electricity meters, and a head-end system (HES) capable of managing the contracted volume of smart electricity meters reporting their readings every 15 minutes.

As part of this new contract, Ubiik will have installed 310,000 additional electricity meters by 2022 in Taipei, Taichung, Nantou, Kaohsiung, Pingtung and Taitung areas.

Ubiik has been awarded the Taipower AMI tender for three consecutive years, resulting in a cumulative contract value of NT$1.26bn to deliver the communication network and infrastructure that support more than 600,000 smart electricity meters, constituting the largest LPWAN network in Taiwan.

“Through the rigorous field testing and verification during the past three years,” said Tien-haw Peng, CEO of Ubiik, “we have successfully demonstrated that our innovative Weightless technology and PaaS have become an advantageous and market-proven IoT. We are pleased to win Taipower’s AMI tender this year again, and we are excited to see the growing interest and demand in the global market with diversified use cases.”

Founded in 2016, originally focused on LPWAN technology, Ubiik developed bi-directional LPWAN hardware and software based on the Weightless open standard protocol. Ubiik has implemented all the layers of this spectrally efficient bi-directional communication protocol into its end devices and base stations, including the physical layer, digital signal processing, baseband processing and link layer (for example data fragmentation, reassembly, flow control), and has built interfaces and core network functionalities to ensure reliable operation of large-scale networks.

Its core network is managing close to 200,000 end devices for more than 20 million messages daily, or 1Gbyte of wireless traffic; average message is 45byte. The use of technologies such as WebSocket Secure, gRPC, DLMS/Cosem and data compression allows for scalability with lightweight hardware requirements and lower backhaul traffic.

The Weightless core network and the base stations autonomously and continuously coordinate roaming across the network and monitor the radio environment to adjust adaptively the scheduling of radio resources, the frequency channels in use, or the transmit power and data rates of the end devices to optimise the network efficiency.

The core network also seamlessly manages large-scale firmware update and has already demonstrated the firmware update over-the-air of tens of thousands of devices without disrupting their normal operation in the process. Combined with Ubiik’s incremental firmware update technology, this is said to set it apart from alternative LPWAN in terms of ease-of-use, efficiency and reliability.

Building on its know-how and vertically integrated technology, Ubiik has further advanced and augmented its offering to cope with more challenging deployment conditions, with all its end devices capable of acting as relays, and with the addition of its cloud-based virtual base stations.

The Weightless offerings are also suitable for a wide range of private deployments, especially when operating in licensed frequency bands. Its narrow footprint – as low as 100kHz of TDD spectrum – and its versatility make it suitable for operation in sub-GHz bands such as 400-510MHz or 800-960MHz.

Ubiik has successfully developed its PaaS (platform-as-a-service) for AMI application. The platform offers user interface and database with data analysis and device management functions, to analyse big data from smart meters and optimise the operation of communication devices.

Upon the completion of the Taipower’s 2020 AMI deployment, the PaaS system will manage a connectivity network of 600,000 smart power meters, as well as process 80 million messages per day.

Since its first deployment of 70,000 smart power meter connections in 2018, Ubiik’s AMI system has consistently ranked among the top performers in all acceptance tests performed by Taipower covering wireless communication reliability, resiliency and latency with more than 95% of all 15-minute meter readings processed within 15 minutes as well as backend and HES overall performance, on-demand reading latency, availability, and disaster handling and recovery.

Building on its deployments in Taiwan, Ubiik’s LPWAN offerings have successfully entered markets in Japan, USA and Europe, to expand applications in smart factory and smart building energy management.