The Telstra IoT Network

[Title] Leveraging IoT to become more customer centric

Sydney Water at Telstra Vantage 2019

Sydney Water supplies water and waste water services to the greater Sydney population including the Blue Mountains and the Illawarra. About 20 billion dollars worth of assets a thousand pumping stations, 250 reservoirs, 25,000 kilometres of

waste water pipe, 21,000 kilometres of water network and about four and a half to five million customers.

So the 21,000 kilometres of pipe work pretty much we rely on customers to tell us when something goes wrong and the same with a waste water network. So, the first that we were going to know about that is when a customer rings in and tells us something has gone pear shaped. The opportunity for us was really to be more customer centric and to get ahead of the event.

We tried 17 different vendors, five different solutions, five different wide area networks until we landed on the one that we were comfortable with. When we'd done enough trialling to be comfortable, we picked the technologies that had actually done best out of it. Telstra gave us a platform at zero cost for us to try out technologies which was a real spring starter for us.

From the scalability point of view, one of the reasons we chose the Telstra platform as it happens was because it's scalable. The thing we've been most pleasantly surprised about is the connectivity within the IoT. So, it's been significantly better than we expected and it allows us to expand much more rapidly than having to build out our own network. So major plus we've got an end to end technology platform that we can use immediately. And so far, the tangible benefits we're seeing are the knowledge about things that we didn't know about previously. So, we've had it in the sewers to try and stop environmental overflows, and the environmental overflows detected 23 already it's been in nine months, so it's an immediate win. It's all about either an outcome for the environment, for the customer, or for our staff and for all of those IoT and the technology that's available at low price, low bandwidth is perfect for us.

Demonstrating the benefits for a customer perspective has been what it's all about, it's moving from an asset centric organisation really to customers centric organisation. What we're expecting is certainly digital metering and opportunity to change customer usage patterns. We've worked with Telstra for 25 years for communications on our SCADA network and this was a natural extension really of that relationship. Our next stage is to scale it up. So, we started with five hundred devices we're in the process of rolling out 10,000 and once we get the benefits from that it'll be millions.