This post has been transcribed from an email support call
As part of our evaluation of third party meters in the market, we require information on the following manufacturers:


Echelon, Elster Kent, Itron, EDMI, Schneider Electric and Wasion.


The information sought is on each manufacturer's smart PLC meter range.

I assume you mean PLC as Power Line Carrier.


Elster Kent has not given me samples yet, although it seems that G3-PLC would be treated like the other transports (e.g. GPRS or RS232 or RS485); and that they will support DLMS over PLC in future. They have an interoperability standard with L+G, Iskra and Itron, I think? However, I have not seen these meters yet.
But please talk to Simon Dart about this:
Simon.Dart@elster.com
Some information can be downloaded at:

http://wiki.pnpscada.com/showthread.php?438-Does-my-meter-need-to-be-SABS-approved-RCC-Certs-and-QMS-Certs
We also resell Elster meters from SDG Technologies.


As far as I'm aware, EDMI is not selling any PLC meters. Billingonline may have more information for you regarding this (they are importers of EDMI hardware):
gert@billingonline.co.za


For Echelon, you may speak to Otto Kruger at Umfa, or Francois Conradie at Remote Metering Solutions, which will both be glad to sell you Echelon meters or give you information about them. They are both PNPSCADA resellers:
Otto@umfa.co.za
francois@remotemetering.net
However, the PLC is not real time in large networks, G3-PLC is about 100x better in my opinion.


For Itron, I'm not sure they are doing anything much in the PLC sphere. As far as I'm aware, they are not doing G3-PLC yet. You may want to speak to Ivar Kilian, he is the supplier of Itron to City of Cape Town where we read itrons over GPRS modems, he is stationed at the main Itron offices in South Africa which is situated in Cape Town:
Ivar.kilian@itron.com


As far as I'm aware Schneider Electric is not doing anything over PLC. They generally have their own parallel Modbus RTU network (RS485). We do not deal with them directly at this stage, they have a whole training course thing they do where they accredit resellers. The best contact we have into their network is Nigel Armstrong from Green Wave:
nigel@greenwave.co.za


For Wasion, the guys are very busy, both China and South Africa, so to get support is not always so easy. We currently only successfully deal with Netvendor in South Africa, probably because of good personal relationship:
(because they are busy, rather contact me at marinus@sdgtech.co.za if you want quotes or info on this. It doesn't fit into the supplier's reseller model if I give you their email address here)
Some information can be downloaded at:
http://wiki.pnpscada.com/showthread.php?443-Wasion-Test-and-Technical-Documentation

We resell Netvendor Wasion meters from SDG Technologies, and give discounts if you use PNPSCADA for reading them.