Silver Spring Networks said NRTC will offer its Gen5 platform to the 1,500 electric utilities it represents. Roughly 50 million Americans get power or telephone service from a rural utility represented by NRTC, and the company claims to have deployed almost 3.5 million endpoints. The latest agreement will enable NRTC to offer Silver Spring’s two-way metering infrastructure to its utility members.
NRTC joins Baltimore Gas & Electric, CitiPower & Powercor, ComEd, Consolidated Edison, CPS Energy, Florida Power & Light, Pacific Gas & Electric, Pepco Holdings and Singapore Power as a Silver Spring partner. Silver Spring has also deployed networks in Copenhagen, Denmark; Glasgow, Scotland; Paris, Providence, Rhode Island; and Stockholm.
The company’s IPv6 mesh technology is already in its fifth generation, with claims of more than 25 million devices deployed worldwide.
Silver Spring Networks is headed by Michael Bell, a former Apple executive who also headed up product development at Palm before that company was bought by Hewlett-Packard for $1.2 billion. Bell then led Intel’s internet of things efforts before taking over as CEO of Silver Spring last fall. One of the first things Bell did was to open the company’s application programming interfaces, which use the the IEEE 802.15.4g wireless interoperability standard, called Wi-SUN (SUN stands for smart utility metering).
“We are honored to partner with NRTC to offer cooperative utilities across the U.S. our innovative technology being used by some of the world’s leading utilities on five continents,” said Bell. “Silver Spring’s open standards-based platform helps ensure that we can provide all customers – regardless of their size or service territory – the best performance and flexibility to connect meters and a wide range of advanced end-devices, while also future-proofing for any services that they may consider down the road.”
Sean Tippett, director of business development at Silver Springs, spoke recently at the Enterprise IoT Summit in Austin, Texas, where he outlined four guiding principles for cities and their vendors as they approach the smart city opportunity.
