By offering meter data collection, telecom, cloud hosting services and communication cards to electricity distribution companies, Reliance Industries Ltd is eyeing the smart electricity meter market and plans to leverage its Jio business.

With the aim of cutting distribution losses, this offering comes just in the backdrop of the world’s largest electricity smart meter programme under way in India. This will help in raising annual revenues of debt-laden discoms to ₹1.38 trillion by replacing 250 million conventional meters.  

The company is exploring offering these services through Narrow Band-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) and is looking at the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) business for the same. 

As smart meters require a two-way communication network, control centre equipment and software applications for near real-time gathering and transfer of energy usage information, NB-IoT is a low-power wide-area network radio technology standard developed by 3GPP, a standards organization, to enable a wide range of cellular devices and services. 

“Some of the services that RIL may offer include meter data collection, communication cards, telecom and cloud hosting services," said one of the people requesting anonymity.

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her budget speech earlier this year said, “I urge all the states and Union territories to replace conventional energy meters by prepaid smart meters in the next three years. Also, this would give consumers the freedom to choose the supplier and rate as per their requirements."