Neptune® FirstNet® AT&T Cellular AMI Deployment
Ferguson Waterworks upgrades a utility's aging system with a new infrastructure-free AMI to enhance billing accuracy, technical support efficiency, and overall customer satisfaction.
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Project Overview
Margate, Florida, is part of the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach Metropolitan Statistical Area and home to nearly 60,000 residents. The city is known within the metro for offering exceptional quality of life and municipal services. This includes their Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) for enhanced utility billing accuracy, as well as utility technical support.
Unfortunately, the existing AMI system aged, and consequently, billing accuracy waned. As a result, customer satisfaction decreased. Seeking a solution to restore their residents’ faith in their utility authority, the City of Margate consulted the Ferguson Waterworks Meter & Automation Group.
Challenge
The city was facing catastrophic AMI meter/MIU failure throughout its service area. Consequently, they sought an infrastructure-free AMI distributor and integration partner to help them optimize the utility system’s accuracy and also restore their customer’s satisfaction.
Products Utilized
– T-10® 5/8″ x 3/4″ – 2″ meters
– MACH 10® 3″ – 8″ ultrasonic water meters
– FirstNet Cellular AMI endpoint
– Neptune 360™ Smart Meter Data Management Software
Method
After reviewing the service area challenges and previous solution/partner issues, the Meter & Automation Group recommended deploying the Neptune FirstNet AT&T AMI Cellular solution for the entire service area. This solution relies on FirstNet, a nationwide communications network with always-on priority across all AT&T spectrum bands for first responders and public safety applications.
Installation contractor National Metering Service deployed 17,000 Neptune T-10 meters and MACH 10 ultrasonic meters with the FirstNet Cellular AMI endpoint. This meter network feeds information into the Neptune 360 meter data management platform to minimize the IT load on the municipal team.
Solution
The City of Margate chose Ferguson Waterworks and Neptune as their trusted partners because of our Meter & Automation Group’s extensive expertise, team resources, strong supplier/manufacturer partnerships, and product reliability.
Key Results
– No AMI fixed-network infrastructure installation, maintenance, operations or upgrade costs for the life of the deployment
– Seamless integrations for a flexible AMI solution
– Access to meter data from anywhere at any time with Neptune 360™ software
– Daily consumption reads reporting every 6 hours, broken down into 15-minute increments
– Improved operations and customer service with real-time, high-resolution AMI data and advanced analytics
– Automatic recovery from network outages with 96-day data storage
– Faster reporting and anomaly notifications
– Two-way solution using LTE-M cellular technology maximizes coverage with FirstNet® in the US cellular network
– Sensitive information is highly secure
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