A really successful rollout…

Optus is one of Australia’s largest providers of telecommunications and mobile telephony services, with an extensive network that covers 98.5% of the Australian population. Since 2010 Optus has invested over $3 billion to improve its mobile network to reach more customers, deliver faster internet and improve customer service reliability. In 2015 Optus selected Metropolis to replace the accumulation meters across its South Australia, New South Wales and Queensland mobile base station network with advanced meters, so that it could better monitor electricity consumption, resolve billing discrepancies and access competitive rates.

Challenge

Deploy over 1,200 electricity advanced meters in remote and, at times, difficult to reach locations within tight work windows of only a few hours each, due to the need to strictly manage power outages - often requiring permissions from other telecommunications carriers who share facilities.

Solution

Through careful planning, resource management and stakeholder engagement Metropolis successfully deployed advanced meters to all selected sites in three tranches of three months each without a disruption to network operations.

Outcome

Metropolis has resolved long term site access issues, which resulted in consecutive estimated meter readings and inaccurate billing. Metropolis provides Optus with online access to energy consumption data – through Dialogue, Metropolis’s on-line web portal service and monthly downloads of interval data – to analyse network performance.
Metropolis assesses network tariffs for each mobile base station to identify the optimum tariff and manages the process to have network tariffs updated through each of the distribution business - saving Optus hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.