Appalachian Electric Co-operative (AEC) is a utility based in New Market Tennessee providing electric services to over 40,000 members in the Eastern Tennessee area [1]. AEC started its initial phase of deployment with 5,000 advanced meters in 2005 [1]. TUNet combines a 220 MHz wide-area network with a 900 MHz local-area mesh network to implement a two-way, real time communications system. Data collected at each endpoint “hops” to a local transceiver, which then establishes a connection with the radio tower and, ultimately to the utility’s operations center [1, 2]. One of the most important benefits of the AMI system installed is the elimination of trips to remote farms and far-flung communities, which would result in immediate cost savings by removing high-cost reads, while ensuring that all customers within the jurisdiction received the same high level of service.
