A robust and efficient water management system is crucial for modern utilities, relying heavily on accurate, real-time data from smart water meters. These meters are deployed across vast and often remote areas, transmitting critical consumption figures, leak detection alerts, and operational data. Ensuring the secure, reliable, and efficient flow of this data is paramount for accurate billing, infrastructure maintenance, and resource conservation.

Traditional mobile connectivity methods often present significant challenges, lacking the granular control and flexibility needed for large-scale, distributed IoT deployments. Utilities and their solution providers require the ability to make data-driven decisions, enhance operational resilience, and maintain stringent data integrity, which is where advanced IoT-powered smart metering solutions, underpinned by Stacuity, come in.

Through advanced features such as flexible routing policies, granular network control, and edge capabilities, Stacuity offers a comprehensive solution for water utilities and their solution providers seeking secure, resilient, and compliant transmission of water meter data. Whether meters are in urban basements or remote rural pipelines, Stacuity provides an advanced and highly controllable connectivity offering.

For smart water metering, granular control over data flow is critical for security, efficiency, and compliance. Stacuity’s VSlice functionality empowers users to self-configure and precisely dictate how data from individual water meters or entire meter groups is routed. This allows utility providers to direct sensitive meter readings and operational data directly over private networks, completely bypassing the public Internet where needed.

Within these dedicated network slices, you can implement precise network segmentation—routing diagnostic data to a specific engineering platform while billing data goes to a dedicated billing system, for example. This capability significantly mitigates the risk of data breaches and unauthorised access by ensuring data travels only on approved, secure paths.

Stacuity also enables flexible Operator Policies, allowing you to explicitly choose preferred mobile networks for your meters in specific regions and define fallback strategies. This ensures optimal connectivity and resilience, avoiding reliance on a single network and guaranteeing critical meter readings can always be transmitted.

Stacuity customers gain granular visibility and control over their water meter connectivity in real-time. This includes Network Event Notifications, alerting you of any issues across your meter network in real-time. From a smart metering perspective, these alerts may include connectivity issues (e.g., loss of transmission from a specific meter), a potential device malfunction detected via connectivity patterns, or security concerns (e.g., an unexpected change in device IMEI).

These network events, which are typically only visible to the operator, are made available via webhooks or API calls. This empowers utilities to not only proactively address issues but also to automate responses and trigger workflows. For example, a ‘loss of connectivity’ event from a water meter could automatically trigger an API call to reconfigure that meter’s routing policy within Stacuity (closing the loop for self-healing). Alternatively, it could send an alert to a third-party field service management system, dispatching a technician, or update a billing system’s status for a particular meter. This direct feedback loop enables unparalleled operational agility, ensuring consistent and accurate data for billing and infrastructure management.

In addition, Stacuity’s Real-Time Packet Capture feature allows you to pinpoint issues between water meters and your backend systems. You can download packet captures directly into your preferred analysis tool for deep-level troubleshooting, drastically cutting down diagnostic times.

Stacuity offers a unique capability with its Remote Access Proxy, enabling fully secure access (via web and SSH) to any web-enabled water meter. Meters can be updated, reconfigured, and troubleshooted all remotely, significantly reducing the requirement for costly and time-consuming engineer site visits. This feature also utilises dynamic and secure network routing, removing the need for a fixed public IP address on meters, which significantly reduces their attack surface and enhances security.

With water utilities facing increased data regulations and specific data residency requirements, Stacuity provides a cost-effective, adaptable solution. Through our globally distributed managed edge network of packet gateways, Stacuity enables local breakout, allowing you to specify that water meter data remains within a particular country or region.

This ensures data compliance with regulations and also optimises performance due to reduced latency, as meter data takes the most direct path to your regional data centers. Furthermore, the Key-Value Store at the edge allows for buffering of meter readings during transient network outages, preventing data loss and providing another layer of resilience.