Nearly one million smart meters deployed by Polaris Smart Metering across Uttar Pradesh now run on RF mesh technology from Wirepas, a release by Wirepas said.
The release observed that Uttar Pradesh is India’s most populous state and, predictably, one of its biggest energy consumers. Yet the real story of its grid modernisation is not being written in the gleaming IT corridors of Noida. It is being written in the villages, where close to 78 per cent of the state’s population lives and where agriculture, not technology, drives the economy. Modernising a grid that must serve both worlds demands connectivity that scales and flexes with the need.
The Uttar Pradesh deployment reflects a partnership already proven at national scale. Polaris has deployed one million smart meters in the field using a dual communication solution developed in close partnership with Wirepas, meeting the strict service level requirements of large scale rollouts without dedicated gateways. Wirepas networks are also known for recovering quickly after outages, even in remote and mountainous terrain, delivering the continuous, accurate data utilities need for billing, loss reduction and demand management.
How Wirepas is different
The approach turns conventional smart metering economics on its head. Traditional deployments need a gateway for every few meters or a SIM card inside every meter, adding cost, complexity and a dependency on cellular coverage that simply cannot be guaranteed in remote and rural areas. With Wirepas Mesh, there are no gateways and no SIM cards. The meters themselves form the network, passing data to one another and back to the utility, with dual communication meters using cellular only where it makes sense. Every new meter installed extends the network’s reach, which means even the smallest community gets rapid, affordable connectivity, and the network grows stronger the further it spreads, the release noted.
Economics for rural India
“Uttar Pradesh captures why we do what we do. It is one thing to connect a smart building in a city. It is another to build a network that serves a farming village and an IT hub with the same reliability, without asking either to pay for infrastructure they don’t need. When the meters themselves are the network, the economics finally work for rural India, and no community is too small or too remote to be part of the smart grid. Polaris is proving that at scale, and we are proud to be inside those meters,” said Teppo Hemiä, CEO, Wirepas.
Over 11 million meters connected nationally
Wirepas is India’s most widely adopted dedicated smart meter connectivity, with over 11 million meters connected across the country and a 20 percent market share, proven in deployments under the Government of India’s Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme. Its standards-based platform complies with DLMS and IS15959 requirements, integrates with any Head End System through standardised APIs, and carries a guaranteed 99.9 percent SLA. Wirepas Certified is also the first AMI connectivity platform in the market with a performance guarantee: if a meter does not connect or perform, the service is free.
Featured photograph (source: Wirepas) is for representation only