Time is a great leveler and determination, consistency and patience always pays off in the long run. These could be the best describers of what happened over the last 6-7 years in India, and which culminated in the month of November 2008, where there were hectic parleys which resulted in an expert committee formed by the Ministry of Power In India, formally deciding to recommend to adopt the IEC 62056 / DLMS COSEM Series as India's national metering protocol standard, with India specific companion standard to cater to country specific requirements.
It would not have been too far from truth, if one were to worry even 6 months ago, whether India will ever have a meter communication protocol standard. The metering lobby has been all along pushing for an API based proprietary metering mechanism, with data export to a standard XML format as their version of a communication standard. The fact that this was not a metering communication protocol standard in the first place, and was inflexible to build good AMR and AMI architectures and had limited profile support all were in the end it's biggest short-comings. Even after proposing this standard called MIOS 3-4 years back, the detailed specification of the same, in a standard format and completeness to the same, took a long time to be formulated by meter manufacturers, considering the complexity of the register based naming and lack of homogenity. The fact that this standard itself was becoming a problem for meter manufacturer's to maintain, upgrade and implement might be the hidden truth.
DLMS/COSEM has always been seen suspiciously by the major meter manufacturer's in India, even though all had DLMS/COSEM compliant meters for International market was something many experts in this field cannot digest. It has to be believed that the CPRI DLMS/COSEM conformance testing center, together with Kalkitech's DLMS/COSEM Server and Client Source Code Library, gave a lot of confidence in the community that, if one were to implement the same, they still could do it in a short time, and once they all started implementing, their own confidence in the protocol all would have played a major role in taking the entire community to gravitate and finally accept a DLMS/COSEM Metering standard for India.
It would be right to state that the intervening 5-7 years, were really accrimonious times for the remote metering space in India, and the major problem that used to get thrown out at people supporting DLMS/COSEM was the Indian requirement of supporting vast amount of tamper conditions, and the seemingly general statement that Indian conditions cannot be captured fully under DLMS COSEM. This has been one of the major planks that we have been trying to expose, and with kalkitech's report on a companion specification under DLMS COSEM to handle India specific tampers, and the new event object's that were introduced by DLMS UA, went a long way to reduce the opposition to DLMS and help enable capture country specific conditions and incorporate in a generic fashion within DLMS/COSEM.
Finally in November 2008, Indian Power Ministry decided, India will have a standard set of communication protocols for metering, AMR and AMI and will also have it's own set of companion standard that captures India specific conditions. This decision historic in many senses, also requires us to appreciate and understand that metering protocols are not a closed chapter, but an always evolving area and India will need to consistently spend time and effort in actively participating in making it work for the Indian conditions, as well as for AMR and AMI applications that get's conceived in the future.
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