Eka Systems has announced the successful AMI pilot installation at Tampa Electric Co. designed to serve multi-family residential customer sites.

The AMI program will evaluate operational improvements and wireless infrastructure performance in extreme, hard to read locations such as commercial luxury residential hi-rise, cement buildings built to new hurricane construction standards. Before the AMI Smart Network, walk-by meter reading would entail traveling up and down elevators, and often getting off at individual floors to read meter signals. With the new EkaNet Smart Network, electric meters in both buildings communicate through a secure self-forming, self-healing mesh architecture consisting of EkaNet wireless meter Nodes and wireless Gateways. The consolidated readings are gathered at an EkaNet Gateway, which transmits usage data to EkaNet Network Manager. Once downloaded, detailed data analysis will be performed using EkaNet Data Manager before export to the utility’s billing system.

The EkaNet Smart AMI solution was provisioned with minimal Installation effort and tools and rapidly deployed. It utilizes true wireless mesh networking technology to overcome the traditional limitations associated with controlled and managed “mesh-like” systems, thus enabling meters to automatically respond to their dynamic wireless environment and intelligently route data without hard limits on the number of hops or meter Nodes per Gateway.