Telecommunication industry sources say there are over 200,000 cell sites in the United States. Most of these sites are located on private property that is leased from the owner. When cell sites are located on leased properties, the telecommunications company needs to place meters to monitor their energy consumption and demand, in order to reimburse the property owner for their share of the utility bill. A number of challenges can arise in this situation.

When non-communicating energy meters are used to monitor the electricity used by the cell site, there is the question of less accurate measurements as well as the need to manually read the meters on a regular basis. The manual read can be performed by either the telecommunications company’s personnel or by the property owner. Both of these situations can present problems. On the one-hand, access to the meters and time for the meter reading may be difficult for the telecommunications company to arrange, and it is much more costly for them to manually read the meters. And when the telecommunications company needs to rely on the property owner to perform the reading, there is both the possibility of a less experienced person misreading the meters and of the meter reading not taking place in a timely manner. The end result can be confusion in billing, delay in processing the reimbursement to the property owner, and the real possibility of mistakes in allocating the costs, leading to payment discrepancies.

With non-communicating energy meters, there is no way for the telecommunications company to remotely monitor real time operating conditions and identify sites operating out of the normal expected ranges. This is not a good situation for a telecommunications company to be in!

EIG meters have 4G LTE, Ethernet and WiFi communication options to meet your application needs, giving you remote access to all meter readings.