LAS VEGAS – Ericsson announced a partnership with AT&T on a sustainable city initiative designed to bring connectivity to the city of Atlanta’s water supply.
The trials are said to allow the organization overseeing the Chattahoochee River Basin, which is the main drinking water source in Atlanta, to monitor water quality from a remote location. The technology was developed by the Ericsson as part of its Technology for Good innovation challenge. The goal of this project was to significantly bring down the cost of water quality testing.
“When you’re taking about environmental monitoring and environmental sustainability, there is really only one category of device on the market and those are industrialized devices that are made for municipal water systems or for governmental agencies so they are very expensive,” explained Charles Dasher, Ericsson’s technology design lead at the Atlanta Idea Factory, as part of a demo of the solution.
“Connectivity is driving cities to rethink how they use technology to benefit their residents. AT&T is excited to be a part of these first field trials and we look forward to providing the connectivity to enable cities to become smarter and more sustainable,” added Mike Zeto, GM of smart cities at AT&T.
Dasher, the mastermind behind the solution, says the technology uses sensors designed by Ericsson and connectivity provided by AT&T to measure the conductivity, turbidity, temperature and thermometry of the water supply.
Watch Dasher demonstrate the connected water solution below.
“What we’ve done is we’ve taken a $10,000 device and we’ve shrunk the cost down to under $300 including connectivity and we’ve connected it using LTE Category 1 power saving mode,” Dasher explained. “This allows us to have an increased amount of sampling in terms of how often during the day do we take samples, but more importantly, it increases our battery life by years and years and years.”
This is not the first or last time the Swedish equipment maker and AT&T U.S. are expected to team up on “Internet of Things’ solutions. Both announced earlier this week they will be part of a smart city alliance that also includes industry heavyweights Cisco, Deloitte, Ericsson, GE, IBM, Intel and Qualcomm.
Hear AT&T IoT chief, Chris Penrose, discuss the company’s Internet of Things strategy and the Smart City Alliance below.
