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【Organization】Ubiik pioneers in Taiwan's IoT innovation
Among the many innovative companies in the IoT space, Taiwan-based AMI specialist Ubiik stands out. Ubiik has established a hybrid cellular/non-cellular IoT offer for smart meters and an expanding cellular/non-cellular LTE offer for smart grids. Taiwan has so far awarded AMI contracts for 4.5 million smart meters in total; Ubiik’s share stands at about 26 percent. “We are the market leader, and we are winning tenders every time,” says Petitgrand, Chief Technology Officer at Ubiik.
Five years ago, Ubiik responded to a Taiwanese government tender to deploy Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) across the country by developing a solution based on the unfashionable low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) technology Weightless.Since then, Ubiik has secured numerous contracts and helped to propel state-owned Taipower to second in the league table for global smart-grid performance—only behind Electricite de France; out of 94 companies in 39 countries, as ranked by Singapore Power Group.
Petitgrand notes that the success stemmed from the pragmatic approach of the Taiwanese government: ”It just said: ‘This is what I want; you propose the tech, and, if it works, you qualify.’ End of story. It didn’t try to harmonize the technology; just the interface with the meter. It’s not an approach you see very often. I mean, it is the opposite of France, say, where EDF spent years’ researching power-line communications (PLC), even participated in the standardization (of G3-PLC), and then said: ‘Okay, I need 20 million PLC units’. There was no other option. And it doesn’t work all that well, but that’s what they asked for.”
NTU IMP is honored to have Petitgrand as one of our mentors. Students who apply could have the chance to explore the IoT sphere and advance their skills in engineering and marketing with seasoned professionals at Ubiik.
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