Swissphone Brings Mioty Into Play, Supporting Axpo Safety-Critical Application

In a pilot project, the Swiss energy producer and supplier Axpo has automated the monitoring of pole disconnectors in the power grid – via the new LPWAN radio standard Mioty. Even under unfavorable conditions including test drives at 120 km/h, Mioty has proven to be extremely robust.

In Switzerland, Axpo does not need any special introduction: The company generates and distributes electricity for three million Swiss people – that’s more than a third of the population – and is the country’s largest provider of energy from renewable sources (mainly hydropower). Like most energy suppliers, Axpo maintains an extensive, high-performance and fail-safe communications network in order to obtain the necessary information on the status of all the components in their energy network at all times. For this task, three years ago the Axpo Group acquired WZ-Systems, a specialist in crisis-proof communications, which now operates the group’s communications infrastructure of radio relay links and cloud services.

Mioty is a relatively new LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network) technology developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS). Based on the ETSI specification TS 103357, Mioty was designed for IoT devices, especially in industrial applications and smart city concepts that have to meet very high requirements regarding robustness and quality of service. The main task of the radio protocol is to establish an interference-resistant radio connection covering long distances. In theory, Mioty is ideally suited for the large-area networking of pole disconnectors. The pilot project has shown that the radio protocol also proves itself in practice.

Mioty is highly resistant to RF interference, due to its integrated telegram splitting technology.