South Carolina-based Vision Metering is incorporating the LoRaWan protocol and Semtech LoRa devices in smart meters across the USA and Latin America.

Vision Metering develops IoT utility advanced metering infrastructure (AMI)-based electric meters and meter interface units for water and gas meters.

As a result of integrating Semtech’s LoRa devices and the LoRaWan protocol, Vision has been quickly onboarding municipal utilities across the USA and Latin America with its metering hardware and software at a rate of two to three per week.

Vision helps its customers install their own LoRaWans and provides them with plug-and-play tools to manage their systems, avoiding costly third-party connectivity contracts. Additionally, Presque Isle Electric & Gas Co-Op, a Vision customer, says it is conducting a full system deployment for its rural electric cooperative over a nine county area in north-east Michigan to replace its monthly member-read honour system and annual true-up task of manually reading 47,500 meters.

Moreover, a representative from the Ferry County Washington Public Utility District No. 1 said it was projected to save over $20,000 this year just by eliminating 160km round trip transportation costs to read the electric meters of remote customers in the Cascades through the adoption of the end devices featuring LoRa.

“Semtech’s LoRa devices have been instrumental in our development and successful rollout of a new completely modular system for any combination of electrical, water and gas utilities,” said Randy Austin, CEO of Vision. “Our cooperative and public owned utility customers are saving all kinds of money by upgrading legacy systems to Vision’s fixed, long range AMI that eliminates traditional manual meter reading methods and expensive truck rolls to turn services on and off.”

Semtech’s technology has a diverse range of applications including smart cities, health care, utilities, supply chain and logistics, which aligns with Vision’s goal of designing and bringing smart electricity, gas and water meters throughout the globe.

“Vision’s smart meters utilising LoRa empower utility companies in both urban and rural areas with smart, sustainable and efficient utility management,” said Marc Pegulu, vice president at Semtech. “The ease of deployment, scalability and cost-savings capabilities of LoRaWan make it the de facto platform connectivity choice for a growing market of electrical, water and gas IoT monitoring applications.”

California-based Semtech’s LoRa device-to-cloud platform is a globally adopted long range, low power option for IoT applications, enabling the rapid development and deployment of low power, cost efficient and long range IoT networks, gateways, sensors, module products and IoT services worldwide.

Vision Metering is an electrical and electronic manufacturing company based out of York, South Carolina.