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South Korea's top wireless carrier builds Internet of Eels

Sensors to keep farm tanks comfy to stop the eels shrieking

Eels, a staple in many world cuisines, are apparently more sensitive to their environment when grown in aquaculture facilities than they are in the wild, so South Korean farmers are turning to industrial automation to give them a hand.

Given the inevitable Internet-of-Things-spin, SK Telecom says it's going to implement wireless monitoring systems for a trial at an eel farm in the country's city of Gochang in the North Jeolla Province.

Currently, the SK Telecom release says, eel farming is labour-intensive: the tanks – between 20 and 60 of them in the typical farm – need constant monitoring of indicators like water temperature, dissolved oxygen and pH, “as even minor changes in the environment such as a sudden temperature change, oxygen deficiency or water pollution are fatal to eels”.

The carrier is therefore working with a company called BD Inc to drop sensors for each of these parameters into the tanks, collect the data through a near-field communications protocol, and pass it through a gateway over LTE to an SK Telecom platform called Mobius.

The communications protocol the system will use is Wi-Sun (wireless smart utility network), which is backed by an alliance formed in January 2014.

The combo will let the farmers check tank status from their smartphones, and if key parameters fall out of line, alarms will be sent to the smartphones.

It's better, The Register supposes, than waiting for the eels to start shrieking … ®

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