IT Brief New Zealand - Technology news for CIOs & IT decision-makers
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Telstra and Intellihub sign $100M IoT deal, Telstra reaches 5 million IoT devices
Mon, 7th Feb 2022
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Telstra has announced a $100 million deal with Australia and New Zealand's smart utility infrastructure provider, Intellihub, that will see Telstra provide up to 4.1 million IoT SIMs over the next decade.

This is Telstra's most extensive IoT deal in terms of value and the number of connected devices, and could nearly double the number of devices connected to the company's IoT network.

Telstra has just ticked over 5 million devices now connected to its IoT network, a new milestone for Australia's largest IoT network with around four million square kilometres of NB-IoT coverage and about three million square kilometres of LTE-M coverage.

Using the Cisco Jasper platform, the IoT SIMs will be incorporated into Intellihub's smart meters to deliver real-time monitoring and insights to allow Intellihub and its customers to manage better things like energy demand and solar feed-ins and peaks and troughs.

"This solution demonstrates the power of Telstra IoT in finding real-world solutions and will enable Intellihub's smart meters to get even smarter, providing Intellihub and its customers with deeper, real-time insights to manage the different elements of the energy network," says Telstra Enterprise Group Executive, David Burns.

Intellihub was founded four years ago and has grown significantly with more than one million meters installed and around 1000 new meters going in every day. Telstra's IoT SIM will be soldered into each device at the point of manufacture.

The deal will provide Intellihub with price certainty for the next ten years, key for its next growth phase.

"We've already hit the ground running with around half a million Intellihub smart meters connected to the Telstra IoT network so far," says Burns.

"The deal comes at an exciting time for Telstra, with more than five million devices now connected to Telstra's IoT network. The importance of IoT continues to grow with more than 50,000 devices being connected to our IoT network every month and, as of today, around 1.2 million devices connect to a Telstra LPWAN."

He says by leveraging their mobile network infrastructure, their Cellular Low Power Wide Area Networks (Cellular LPWANs) are explicitly built for scaled IoT deployments to provide better, cost-efficient coverage.

Telstra has the largest IoT network in Australia, around four million square kilometres of NB-IoT coverage and about three million square kilometres of LTE-M coverage. The new networks are built specifically for scaled IoT deployments and provide better, cost-efficient coverage even in challenging locations that high bandwidth technologies may not reach, including underground, where digital meters are often located.

IoT connects everything from vehicles to machines, infrastructure, smart meters, buildings, connected vehicles, solar panels, humidity sensors, traffic cones, buses, white goods and garbage trucks, delivering insights and tools that previously weren't possible.

Connected technologies, such as Telstra's IoT deal with Intellihub, allow organisations to use connected technology to drive positive customer experiences and help remotely monitor their network, equipment and assets.