TAIPEI, Dec. 17, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Ubiik Inc., the global leading Industrial IoT solutions provider based in Taiwan, is proud to announce winning Taiwan Power Corporation (Taipower) Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) tender for the third year running. In this additional US$19.2 million contract, Ubiik again leverages its breakthrough Weightless™ Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies to build a dedicated wireless telecommunications network. With three repeated successes, Weightless™ LPWAN proved to be not only the best technology to meet the demanding requirements of electricity AMI, but also the most scalable and cost-effective solution among all proposals promoted by vendors, including the leading telecom operators in Taiwan.
Ubiik wins US$19.2 million AMI Tender to deploy Taiwan’s largest LPWAN network
Since 2017, Taipower has launched an ambitious plan to deploy 6 million new smart electricity meters in Taiwan by 2030. The unique utility of Taiwan has been aiming to reduce the reliance on manual reading for electricity meter billing. More importantly, digitalizing the metering operation paves the way to better balance the supply and demand for power in the island, especially at a time when the exponential growth of renewable energies (solar PV, wind) and EV infrastructures make the dynamic management of Taipower’s distribution grid increasingly challenging.
Ubiik is one of the handful of vendors qualified by Taipower – after a yearlong technical selection process including live pilots in 2017-2018 – which directly deploy and maintain telecom networks for the operation of these electricity meters. The business model is a 6-year renewable service consisting of Ubiik delivering and maintaining Weightless™ LPWAN as a dedicated telecommunications network, Field Area Network (FAN) communication modules within Taipower’s new electricity meters, and a Head End System (HES) capable of managing the contracted volume of smart electricity meters reporting their readings every 15 minutes.
As part of this new contract, Ubiik will have installed 310,000 additional electricity meters by 2022 in New Taipei City, Taichung, Nantou, Kaohsiung, Pingtung and Taitung areas. Ubiik being awarded the Taipower AMI tender for three consecutive years results in a cumulative contract value of NT$1.26Bn (US$45 million) to deliver the communication network and infrastructure that support more than 600,000 smart electricity meters, constituting the largest LPWAN network in Taiwan and arguably the single largest LPWAN for electricity AMI globally.
"Through the rigorous field testing and verification during the past three years," said Tien-haw Peng, Founder and CEO of Ubiik, "We have successfully demonstrated that our innovative Weightless™ technology and PaaS platform have become an advantageous and market-proven IoT solution. We are pleased to win Taipower’s AMI tender this year again, and we are excited to see the growing interest and demand for our solution in the global market with diversified use cases."
Founded in 2016, originally focused on LPWAN technology, Ubiik successfully developed an innovative bi-directional LPWAN hardware and software solution, based on the open standard protocol called Weightless™. Ubiik has implemented all the layers of this spectrally efficient bi-directional communication protocol into its End Devices and Base Stations, including the physical layer, digital signal processing, baseband processing, link layer (e.g., data fragmentation, reassembly, flow control), and has built highly efficient interfaces and Core Network functionalities to ensure reliable operation of large-scale networks. Its Core Network is currently managing close to 200,000 End Devices for a traffic of more than 20 million messages daily, or 1GB of wireless traffic (average message is 45 bytes). The use of modern technologies (e.g., WebSocket Secure, gRPC, DLMS/COSEM, and data compression) allows for massive scalability with lightweight hardware requirements and significantly lower backhaul traffic than competing offerings.
The Weightless™ Core Network and the Base Stations autonomously and continuously coordinate roaming across the network and monitor the radio environment to adaptively adjust the scheduling of radio resources, the frequency channels in use, or the transmit power and data rates of the End Devices to optimize the network efficiency.
Ubiik’s Core Network also seamlessly manages large-scale firmware update and has already demonstrated the Firmware Update Over-The-Air of tens of thousands of devices without disrupting their normal operation in the process. Combined with Ubiik’s incremental firmware update technology, this sets it apart from alternative LPWAN solutions in terms of ease-of-use, efficiency, and reliability.
Building on its know-how and vertically integrated solutions, Ubiik has further advanced its technology and augmented its offering to cope with the most challenging deployment conditions, with all its End Devices capable of acting as relays, and with the addition of its unique cloud-based Virtual Base Stations.
Ubiik’s Weightless™ solutions are also very suitable for a wide range of private deployments, especially when operating in licensed frequency bands. Its narrow footprint (as low as 100kHz of TDD spectrum) and its versatility make it ideal for operation in sub-GHz bands (e.g., 400-510MHz or 800-960MHz).
Positioned as an IoE (Internet of Energy) solution provider, Ubiik offers more than just innovated connectivity technology to the market. Ubiik has successfully developed its PaaS platform for AMI application. The platform offers user interface and database with data analysis and device management functions, to analyze big data from smart meters and optimize the operation of communication devices. Upon the completion of the Taipower’s 2020 AMI deployment, the PaaS system by Ubiik will manage a connectivity network of 600,000 smart power meters, as well as process 80 million messages per day.
Since its first deployment of 70,000 smart power meter connections in 2018, Ubiik AMI system has consistently ranked among the top performers in all acceptance tests performed by Taipower covering wireless communication reliability, resiliency and latency (with >95% of all 15-minute meter readings processed within 15 minutes) as well as backend and HES overall performance, on-demand reading latency, high-availability and disaster handling and recovery.
Ubiik’s innovative product development roadmap and its strong R&D capabilities from embedded devices all the way to PaaS will ensure it remains at the forefront of new-generation industrial wireless IoT technologies and solutions, and AMI in particular.
Building on its successful deployments in Taiwan, Ubiik’s LPWAN solutions have successfully entered markets in Japan, USA and Europe, to aggressively expand applications in smart factory and smart building energy management.
About Ubiik Inc.
Ubiik is the global leading Industrial IoT solutions provider, at the origin of Weightless™ LPWAN technology — the open standard for bidirectional, fully synchronised, low-power wide area public or private networks. Ubiik offers turnkey solutions for high performance IoT applications demanding superior capacity, QoS and security with full FOTA capability. The team of wireless networking experts and international business veterans has seen fast growth from its base in Taiwan and internationally especially in the areas of energy management and industrial automation. https://www.ubiik.com
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