In what is going to be a significant boost for machine to machine communciations, the Department of Telecom is considering delicensing the 433 MHz frequency band for transmission of information related to utility services, reports The Hindu Businessline. For example, the reading of your water and electricity meter could be transmitted in real-time to the service providers. Our take on delicensing of spectrum for utlities: - This can already be done using existing mobile or BWA spectrum, so where is the need to delicense? We've seen utilities like Nano Ganesh that have been used to switch pumps off and on. The difference is perhaps that if spectrum is delicensed, then it would be at no cost to the utility service providers, who would have to spend on upgrading their systems and consumer premises equipment to allow the machine to machine communication. Delicensed spectrum would mean that once infrastructure cost has been incurred, there would be no cost of transmission of data. - The delicensed spectrum should not only be available to public and privitized utility companies, but for other private services as well. For example, a key that allows you to lock and unlock your house digitally from a few miles away, or allow you to turn the air conditioning when you're a few kilometers away. - The Hindu Businessline story presents a case for public utility service providers also collecting data on consumers usage patterns, so that they can determine time for peak demand, and also have time-specific pricing…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...