LTE-M Saves City Water on Sprinklers

Capstone Metering’s analyzes data from water meters and helps cities reduce wasting water on sprinklers.  

Capstone Metering is among the first ones to use AT&T’s LTE-M technology.

Long-Term Evolution (LTE) is a 4G mobile communications standard. LTE-M is the abbreviation for LTE Cat-M1 or Long Term Evolution (4G), category M1.

This is an IoT technology which enables devices to connect directly to a 4G network, without a gateway and on batteries.

LTE-M is cheaper than regular LTE since the chips use a narrower bandwidth to send data at regular intervals. It is, therefore, very suitable for low-power modems which connect meters and sensors to the network.

The meter connected to the AT&T network is a service meant for water districts.

The service includes the meter, installation, platform, training, analytics, maintenance, connectivity and cloud database.

It is presumed the service will be especially useful to smaller districts, since the water authorities currently pay a per-meter fee.

Real-time data from water-meters greatly affects the water savings and Capstone is working on algorithms to detect leakage and send notifications.