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 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