One we missed, from late February: Spanish water company Aqualia has appointed Vodafone on a 10-year deal to automate and manage its advanced meter infrastructure, with a view to supply more than one million NB-IoT smart meters over the first five years of the contract. The deal, it seems, is a formal extension of an existing contract, which has seen Vodafone connect 250,000 meters to its NB-IoT network in Spain since late 2022. The pair said they will deliver an automated remote “tele-reading” service to more than three million users in Spain over the “coming years”.
Vodafone has around 6.5 million IoT devices under management in the country. A statement (in translation) said the contract covers the “digitization” of Aqualia’s “integral water cycle” in Spain for the next 10 years. Aqualia, majority-owned by the Barcelona-based FCC Group (formerly Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas), is the fourth water company in Europe by customers, and ninth in the world. It provides service to around 45 million users in 18 countries, including parts of Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas.
The work with Aqualia focuses on urban communities, and follows the Spanish government’s Strategic Project for Economic Recovery and Transformation (PERTE) initiative – to “modernise the urban water cycle to improve its efficiency, reduce water losses in distribution systems, and improve wastewater treatment infrastructures”. Aqualia has received €200 million of government funding (in a “second call”). “It is expected to mobilise another €1.7 billion of public funding next year, and create around 3,500 new jobs,” said a statement.
The Vodafone NB-IoT solution measures water consumption in households, industries, and public entities. The pair are working on a metering pilot in the city of Vigo, on Spain’s northwest coast, to “help Aqualia have comprehensive control of the tele-reading solution and ensure the best service to its customers”. The scope of the work is also to detect fraud (“reverse flow and tampering”) and leaks (via hourly data readouts about water levels), and rto predict consumption patterns (for “tight[er] water pumping” to save energy and reduce pressure on the system).
The pair are also looking at ways to engage customers about water consumption, introduce precise (as opposed to estimated) billing for water consumption, and to reduce unregistered water consumption.
Vodafone is supplying the software and the device manager, along with the network – as a “single tool… for unified monitoring of connectivity and data collection, and detecting in real time any deviation from the target SLAs thanks to the configuration of automatic alerts”. The solution provides remote IoT device management and “simplification of integrations with customers’ water management systems”. It also claims end-to-end security on all data communications.
Daniel Barallat, director of IoT for Vodafone Spain, said: “The control and proper management of water use in Spain is a constant and vital challenge of importance today. With this contract, we put our cutting-edge technology at the service of Aqualia to actively contribute to the better conservation of natural resources and more efficient water management.”
