O2 UK has secured a multimillion-pound contract to provide a nationwide smart metering network to G4S Utility Services, one of the UK's largest operators of smart electricity and gas meters.
The deal, which is O2's first commercial venture into smart metering, will see it providing G4S, a division of the UK security company formerly known as Group4 Securitas, with around 200,000 SIM cards that will enable G4S to monitor and manage the metering devices.
"We believe there are real opportunities to use our network to accelerate the roll out of smart meters by helping utility companies and other suppliers to deploy and manage the devices in a quicker and more cost effective way," said O2's business director Ben Dowd, as reported by Information Age.
G4S will use O2's SMS gateway to receive metering data at its data centre, together with the ability to transmit commands back to the devices to determine the working status of the smart meters. The company believes this new capability will reduce maintenance and servicing costs.
G4S recent announced a three-year contract with the business division of British Gas to provide a comprehensive smart gas and electricity metering service covering Wales, the Midlands and the South of England.
For more:
- see this Information Age article
- see this Telecoms.com article
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