I work in water and wastewater and we went through the same thing two years ago.
On City: there’s no doc page for it, so I can’t tell you what it adds for meters. What I can tell you is how the meters themselves go in, which is the regular IoT side with Hermetry’s own LoRaWAN network server. The frequency plan follows your gateway, so EU868 gear in Europe, with OTAA or ABP and Class A or C. There’s a codec library (106 codecs last time I looked) so many meters decode without you writing anything, and pairing mode helps when you’re adding hundreds of the same model.
Things we set up for meters:
- Unconfirmed uplinks. Every ack costs gateway duty cycle, and on 1 % sub-bands that runs out fast.
- The meter’s volume as a counter. On charts and the history API the increase aggregate gives you consumption per hour or day, including when a meter rolls over.
- A Device offline rule so silent meters show up, set longer than the reporting interval.
If the client ever insists on the white space radio, its own gateway would have to report the meters as child devices over MQTT on the v1/gw topics. Possible, but you’d be writing that gateway software yourselves.
The codec list is here: The codec library