Optus IoTConnect

Super on screen: Optus is helping Toowoomba Regional Council track its water usage like never before with 68,000 smart water meters

Talent 1: Rebecca Vonhoff, Councillor, Toowoomba Regional Council

So Toowoomba Regional Council is always looking and thinking about ways to do things better. And I think the decision behind the smart water metres is because to find water savings.

So we went through the proof of concept phase then there was a decision by council when we looked at the results of that phase, and we decided to roll out the full programme.

The benefit for residents is that if there is a leak, somewhere in their system, they're going to know about that much sooner than they would have previously.

It's also really good for residents because, just day to day, they're going to have a lot more understanding about how their water usage habits actually play out with how much water they're using.

Talent 2: Zorawar Singh, former VP Product, Optus Enterprise and Business

By transitioning to smart water metres the Toowoomba Regional Council will have greater operational transparency, which means they will be able to better measure what's being used and if leaks happen, take actions rapidly.

Optus' NB IoT Network, IOTA's platform, Greenby's user experience and ETS deployment efforts collectively deliver a full solution that Toowoomba can deploy and have ease of access to use and also ensure delivery is happening 24/7.

Talent 3: Greg Johnson, Toowoomba Resident

Uh, 23 October 2022, was when it was installed. It was quite a swift process. I found, um, the application of this app, uh, to be pretty straightforward.

I'm a regular watcher of the consumption. Uh, I've got a better understanding of where the water goes now.

And, um, Im going to set myself a target on the app.

You can do that. Uh, you can say, you know, I'm gonna use 200 litres a day.

And I think after that, that will provide us with certain discipline.

Super: During the trial the smart water meters detected a 12% loss of water in the network driving the decision for full implementation

Talent 1: Rebecca Vonhoff, Councillor, Toowoomba Regional Council

This I guess gives them a little bit more information um so that the can really focus on the sustainability, they're able t look after their own household, and then also in think a but bigger about the whole region and look after the whole community.

Talent 2: Zorawar Singh, former VP Product, Optus Enterprise and Business

The technology that we're deploying can be used in other use cases as well. Let's take the example of smart cities.

In smart cities, the technology can be used to manage traffic patterns. WE can proactively look at where traffic is increasing and manage traffic light signals to better accommodate for that.

Another example could be smart buildings as well, where we can look at how many people are in a room, what temperature is being, and accordingly adjust the heating and cooling of the building.

Manage electricity usage appropriately.

We anticipate the long term rollout of cellular IoT to be very positive.

This is primarily because of two reasons. Number one, mass geographical coverage is only really possible through cellular IoT.

Secondly, the NB IoT Technology uses very limited battery life.

It allows us to have devices in the field for more than 10 years.

That is really important in creating technologies that scale.