Natural gas companies in all segments – upstream, midstream, transmission and distribution -have deployed Electronic Flow Measurement (EFM) devices on a massive scale. Since the information contained within the EFMs is crucial to the company’s operations, robust and reliable systems to communicate with EFMs are required.

The EFM data needs of some departments are mission-critical. Gas controllers need real-time information to safely and effectively operate large stations and systems. They need to know what is happening now. Other departments can live with near real-time data. They need to know what happened over the last couple of hours, for example. Finally, some departments might only need daily and monthly data.