Could you tell us a bit about Wirepas and your work with utilities and others in the energy industry?
We focus on the industrial side of wireless connectivity, especially use cases on the infrastructure side – where requirements are quite different to consumer communication. We are a software company, we license our IP and tools and provide connectivity services to enterprises.
We work with utilities directly, or advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) service providers. We are also in smart buildings where large companies like Schneider and Siemens have announced plans to use the NR+ standard we co-developed. And we are in logistics and general internet of things applications.
And that IP, that technology that you work with, is using radio communications rather than Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to create networks to share and transfer data?
We are on a mission to create a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth equivalent on the industry and infrastructure communications side.
Bluetooth, for example, is great for its purpose. It was created to replace wire to connect accessories to phones and computers. Wi-Fi was created as a wireless local network. It’s great for that and it scales to some extent, but where we are, there need to be millions of devices in the network. It’s a different problem. We are addressing that large-scale, ultra-resilient network. Our ambition is for the industrial community to recognize NR+ as the standard for infrastructure.
When you look at clients in the energy space, such as electric utilities, and how they communicate with generators and consumers, where is the industry at today?
The whole grid industry has gone toward smart metering for some time. In places like India, smart metering is being implemented for the first time. In Finland where we are headquartered, grid operators are moving on to the third generation of smart meters, reading at five-minute intervals.
Then there’s a lot of discussion about distributed energy resources like solar, as well as EV charging and so forth. That will push the need for even more frequent reading and bidirectional communication, not only reading the meter for billing purposes, but also for grid dynamics and to control the loads in the grid.
These investments are slow, but we are seeing the need for more frequent meter reading and ability to open and close the meter remotely. It’s the first step toward more advanced connectivity. That’s one of our big aims.
Do electric utilities generally have the skill sets needed to license your technology and manage these telecommunications networks for themselves?
In many regions there is a clear role for AMI service providers. That entity is taking a lot of the burden a utility otherwise would have to do. They put together the funding, the sourcing of components, managing the ecosystem, the communication, connectivity and all that.
But the network itself cannot be provided by third-party services. It should be owned by the utility, it cannot be shared with the other public network services. NR+ is the only wireless standard that has its own dedicated spectrum. It’s not concerned by use of cellular, for example. And when the utility owns this network for itself, there’s no risk that the operator decides to sunset the technology that it chose 10 years ago, leaving the utility forced into a huge new investment.
Cybersecurity is a growing concern for any information network. How do you address that?
It’s important to understand the complete life cycle in cybersecurity. People talk about encryption and so forth, that’s just one piece. It’s how to make sure that device identity is secured and understood, the vulnerability management process, how you maintain and boost the software updates. We are in a good position as a European player because the EU Cyber Security Resilience Act came into effect in September, it’s having a huge impact in the industry and not that many companies are ready.
Preparing for this has been one of our biggest investments, to understand and implement whole life-cycle management in cybersecurity. India has a similar standard, CERT-In, where all software in the infrastructure has to have a valid licence. And we welcome that because we can automate it, and we endorse transparency.
You mentioned that India is the biggest market for NR+ at the moment. What’s behind that and is that something you expect to continue?
India, together with China, are the biggest markets in the world when it comes to the number of meters. And India is most active as we speak. The whole country is going through the update from ‘dumb’ meters to smart meters, and with a nationwide funding scheme India has rapidly boosted the deployment base.
India offers tremendous challenges in environment. Some of the areas are extremely high density. Some are very rural, so there’s even no cellular coverage. And of course, India is well known to be extremely aggressive in terms of pricing.
The learning curve and speed in India is like nothing I have experienced before in this business. So it’s a great place to be, and has pushed us to innovate. Now when we present our products in other markets they are considered disruptive, because we have been under pressure in India to optimize the architecture for massive scale and performance needs.
Another trend we see really reshaping electricity markets is the building of data centers and how rapidly this is happening. Does that impact the communications networks that are associated with energy?
Data centers are welcome when they bring the power with them or invest in it to take the burden away from the grid. And when that happens, the endpoints become interesting, how the buildings or data centers are consuming energy. They need a cohesive communication strategy, how all that is orchestrated and managed. And our mission is to provide that. So that is the standard that we have created together with others, this NR+. It’s really aimed at massive electrification. Data centers are accelerating that trend, but it is not limited to this application only.
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