- The largest LoRa® connected-object deployment in France
Fully dedicated to developing innovative and largely digital services, Nova Veolia and its subsidiary Birdz, a pioneer in the remote metering of energy consumption for Smart Cities, have chosen Orange Business Services to help them digitalize Veolia’s water-related services in France. Their goal is to read more than 70% of their meters remotely by 2027.
Over 3 million water meters will be connected to Orange’s LoRa®
network in France
Veolia’s IoT expert Birdz collects millions
of data items daily via its intelligent water meters to help its clients
(local communities, manufacturers, third parties and retail customers)
reduce their energy bills and improve their services. The Birdz
solutions allow customers to visualize and predict their consumption and
detect atypical consumption (e.g.: water leaks) and instances of fraud.
Following a 12-month trial period in Toulouse, Birdz has chosen the Orange LoRa® network, an innovative and sustainable technology with high-quality service, to connect over 3 million intelligent water meters in France over the next 10 years. The LoRa® network, which is an industry standard and has been deployed by many operators worldwide, will allow Birdz to focus on their core business and develop new services.
The Orange LoRa® network covers over 30,000 municipalities and 95% of the population of Metropolitan France. This low-frequency radio network for connected objects consumes little energy and is affordable. Easy to deploy, it is ideal for intelligent meters, which are often located in hard-to-access environments, such as building basements or within meter access hatches.
Beyond connectivity, Birdz will also rely on Live Objects, the object and data management platform of Orange Business Services, to collect the mass of information from the meters.
A common goal: Make IoT available to cities, communities and citizens
Veolia,
Birdz and Orange Business Services share a common ambition to promote
the development of connected and intelligent services to optimize the
management and consumption of resources and energy in cities.
Frédéric Van Heems, CEO of Veolia Water France, stated: “This project with Orange Business Services illustrates Veolia’s goal to digitalize our businesses and services. It is a true growth driver that will allow us to optimize our methods and performance, and also to propose new services to our customers, in line with their expectations for efficiency, interoperability, and transparency.”
Xavier Mathieu, CEO of Birdz, added: “Birdz has chosen Orange Business Services to help it make a strategic shift from a technology requiring deployment of a radio network infrastructure to a solution that is open, interoperable and reversible and also a solution which meets the needs of our customers.”
With more than 2,000 IoT and data experts, 1,300 cybersecurity experts and teams throughout France, Orange Business Services is close to local communities. It is aware of their energy needs, consumption and their challenges. This makes Orange Business Services the first trusted partner.
Helmut Reisinger, CEO of Orange Business Services, added: “We are proud to help Veolia and Birdz with this major project. Orange Business Services provides many companies with support on projects regarding IoT, data collection, transport, storage, and analysis, guaranteeing a high level of security. Our multi-technology strategy, which includes LoRa®, 2G/3G/4G, and LTE-M, allows us to meet each sector’s specific needs. Already a leader in France, our goal is to become the IoT leader in Europe, and more broadly, to strengthen our position as an operator-integrator worldwide.”
About Orange Business Services
Orange Business Services, the
B2B branch of the Orange Group, and its 25,000 employees, is focused on
supporting the digital transformation of multinational enterprises and
French SMEs across five continents. Orange Business Services is not only
an infrastructure operator, but also a technology integrator and a
value-added service provider. It offers companies digital solutions that
help foster collaboration within their teams (collaborative workspaces
and mobile workspaces), better serve their customers (enriched customer
relations and business innovation), and support their projects (enriched
connectivity, flexible IT and cyberdefense). The integrated technologies
that Orange Business Services offer range from Software Defined Networks
(SDN/NFV), Big Data and IoT, to cloud computing, unified communications
and collaboration, as well as cybersecurity. Orange Business Services
customers include over 3,000 renowned multinational corporations at an
international level and over two million professionals, companies and
local communities in France.
Learn more at www.orange-business.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and our blogs.
Orange is one of the world’s leading telecommunications operators with annual sales of 41 billion euros in 2017 and has 261 million customers in 28 countries at 30 September 2018. Orange is listed on Euronext Paris (symbol ORA) and on the New York Stock Exchange (symbol ORAN).
Orange and any other Orange product or service names included in this material are trademarks of Orange or Orange Brand Services Limited.
About Birdz
Born from the merger of Homerider Systems and
m2ocity and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nova Veolia, Birdz, a pioneer
in remote water meter reading, deploys its unique know-how at the
service of the Smart City. A major player in IoT in France, Birdz offers
a very large ecosystem of solutions to manage the city's utilities and
preserve the quality of the urban environment: water, energies,
temperature, pollution, noise, ... and control the entire value chain,
from sensor design to the useful valuation of millions of data
collected. www.birdz.com
About Veolia
Veolia group is the global leader in optimized
resource management. With nearly 169,000 employees worldwide, the Group
designs and provides water, waste and energy management solutions that
contribute to the sustainable development of communities and industries.
Through its three complementary business activities, Veolia helps to
develop access to resources, to preserve available resources, and to
replenish them.
In 2017, the Veolia group supplied 96 million
people with drinking water and 62 million people with wastewater
service, produced nearly 55 million megawatt hours of energy and
converted 47 million metric tons of waste into new materials and energy.
Veolia Environnement (listed on Paris Euronext: VIE) recorded
consolidated revenue of €25.12 billion in 2017 (USD 30.1 billion). www.veolia.com
