Somewhat surprisingly, the largest smart metering project in South Korea is the work of an Australian company, Melbourne-based Freestyle Technology.

It’s a deployment of smart water meters to more than 24,000 homes in Gochang province. Freestyle was awarded the contract in April 2017 and its successful implementation has led to three other significant smart water metering contracts in South Korea, in the cities of Pohang, Gimje and Bucheon.

Freestyle’s smart meters in Gochang have maintained a read rate in excess of 99 percent. Their ability to detect leaks has saved thousands of litres of water while their ability to detect low or none usage has been used to identify residents in distress who need assistance.

The Gochang Water Department runs daily social welfare checks using data collected by the Freestyle system to ensure the wellbeing of elderly residents in Gochang, where 60 percent of the population is over 60.

Also, the Gochang Water Department now runs its billing on the Freestyle IoT Platform and has seen a reduction in customer complaints.

Freestyle was responsible for the installation and commissioning of the meters and the gateways that enable them to communicate with its Vision by Freestyle monitoring and management software.

Freestyle worked with KSJ, the leading supplier of water meters in South Korea, and with Korea Telecom, which is hosting the Vision by Freestyle software in its cloud.

Vision by Freestyle, launched in February 2018, is a visual situational awareness platform that allows utilities, municipalities, building facility managers and other clients to have real-time insights and control, online or on mobile devices, for all their IoT devices and services.

Freestyle describes it as “an exciting advance that gives users of the FST IoT platform greater visual oversight and control of their customers, their services and associated devices [featuring] features an extensible dynamic gadget-based dashboard encompassing alerts, geo-maps, IoT device consumption insights, configuration, command and control actions.”

Freestyle Technology’s Gochang smart water deployment was Highly Commended in the the Best Municipal Project category at the 2018 Australian IoT Awards, which was held at the IoT Festival on 4 June in Melbourne.