Business View Magazine | October 2020

361 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2020 FLORENCE , AR I ZONA Billingsley: “As part of this process, we needed to bring on experts from different sectors to assist us in meeting our goal. The other thing we did quite well was to look at safety and security first. The first company we brought in was SUBEX– renowned, worldwide, in the cybersecurity arena. We brought them on as our first partner to make sure that people’s private information would be absolutely protected, in terms of what we did in placing remote sensing technology, collecting that data, and the use of that data in a relationship database. “The next question was what type of platform could we utilize so we had that interface between remote sensing and the relational database? We decided on LoRaWAN, a Low Power, Wide Area (LPWA) networking protocol for wireless streaming of data in remote autonomous systems with long battery life. The second vendor that came on to help us set up the LoRaWAN network was IOT Advent Incorporated. We worked with them to figure out how to do something that had never been done before. Processing real- time data from thousands of endpoints into a big data-streaming system that processes the inputs produced by the network to obtain useful, valid, and hidden information. Furthermore, providing an interface that consolidates information from the different systems into a single pane of glass, ensuring everything blends together seamlessly. “To move forward with this, we needed a funding source. So, capitalizing on our weakness (paying an employee to physically read every water meter and write down the numbers by hand each month) we were able to develop an RFP and build partnerships to do an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) meter solution, where we could be a test site, a technology development platform, for our partner to do it here and market it elsewhere and work out the kinks. We are unique in that while that development’s going on, we continue to manually read meters until the technology is developed and everything works properly. We’re very proud of that – it was a really cool way to market ourselves to creative partners.”