Prague, Czech Republic --- (METERING.COM) --- March 28, 2007 – SITRONICS Telecom Solutions (formerly STROM telecom) has announced the launch of a pilot project which will see the introduction of the company’s UTILIS real-time smart metering system in the electricity network of J.P. ELEKTROPRIVREDA HZ HB MOSTAR, a regional electricity supplier in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The pilot will last for seven months, during which the functionalities and performance of the UTILIS system will be tested with 184 metering devices in households. These functionalities include remote reads, service control and data collection. The system could potentially be adopted for the management of about 200,000 metering points within the J.P. ELEKTROPRIVREDA HZ network.

“The utilities industry is undergoing a revolution in operational management and customer services,” explains Mirko Jelčíć, manager of the Utilities Solutions Business Unit at SITRONICS TS. “Accurate, real-time information on energy consumption, quality of service and flexible billing are becoming an ever more important part of the business. And thanks to our extensive and highly successful experience with the management of telecommunication networks and real-time billing systems, this is our strong point.”

“Infrastructure modernization is the only way to lower operational costs and offer better services to our customers,” says Džemal Hadžiosmanović, Head of the Metering Department of J.P. ELEKTROPRIVREDA HZ HB MOSTAR. “In our job we often have to deal with problematic customers and modern methods of remote meter reading enable us to identify fraud in time to prevent potential revenue losses more effectively.”

SITRONICS TS launched its UTILIS real-time smart metering system together with Echelon meters and PLC technology last year. The first utility to adopt the system was Stadtwerke Feldkirch of Austria, which has already begun replacing all its existing meters.