This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Probably worth noting, this article is about UK energy meters. Also, smart meters are wildly different all over the world.
Where I live, the meters have a proprietary wireless receiver, with its own frequency, that is owned and operated by the power company.
It's going to vary, even within counties. A lot of US utility companies are having the same issue, and there are companies that make and sell 3G to 4G adapters for larger coverage areas. For example, microcell that rebroadcasts/converts the 3G signals into a 4G signal for the local towers. Other areas are swapping out 3G for 4G or Lorawan style meters.
And I'm sure even more are just going to arbitrarily create billable usage figures because they outsourced their IT to India, and then outsourced the India team to Pakistan or the Philippines, and then fired them because the CEO's son is really good with computers. Unfortunately, he's just now reading my comment and going "oh...fuck".
How would those microcells be legal? It's not just that 3G or whatever gets shut down, the frequencies are usually reallocated to something else so you can't legally operate a 3G network on those frequencies anymore.
It would depend how regulations are written. It's perfectly conceivable that these can be allowed to operate using a very low power level that wouldn't interfere with the larger network, especially if the use case is for things like substations that are already isolated.
Around here (Portugal) I believe that smart meters send their info over the electrical wire itself (as they had to install repeater/transponder stations at the network transformers and the bandwidth needed for something like this is ridiculously small).
Certainly it would be an upside of being behind most of the rest of Europe in most things - when finally something gets installed in the infrastructure of one of the local politically connected (read: not really competing on superior quality or efficiency) utilities, the technology is already more mature.
Are you from Germany?
It's common all over Europe. It's short range wireless btw, a person from the company has to walk the building halls to collect the data from the meters for example, or come near the house. They use this on all types of meters — power, gas, water.
They still have to do a visual check once in a while because some people are shifty fuckers and can't be trusted. 😄
oh our water company mentioned they were gonna come this week and replace the meter. I guess this is what thats about lol
Yep. I've been going around converting burglar and fire alarms to 4/5G and trashing the 3G radios. If you haven't upgraded, your alarm won't alert your monitoring company if that's the sole path.
That's why they should never switch off 2G.
All the other G's are unimportant.
1G is important. Most emergency services are based on it.
Woot, free parking
Is it a swap of the 2G/3G module? Or is it a full replacement of the meter?
Probably depends on the meter model. Ours was just a modem swap in NZ.
I'll be fucked if I'm getting a smart meter anyway, I'll stick with nice normal top-up prepay meters thank you kindly.
I don't trust British Gas as far as I can throw em.
Pre.. pay? At your own house?
It's relatively new and is a lovely way for utilities companies to side step the rules on cutting people off. They advertise it as an option for people so they have more control over their spending when in reality it has a higher unit charge and is targeted at people who are likely to be financially struggling or close to it.
So what happens is it can just shut off when you haven't paid yet. I work in utilities and I have dealt with literally thousands of homes and these are always in impoverished and working class areas where if the people were to be on a standard policy they would have protections against cut off due to non payment.
This isn't meant as any disrespect to the guy above, I know two sentences about him and that all, just my view of this bullshit.
In some places, you pay for utilities before using them, and they shut you fuck off right in the middle of the month if you've used it up. :/
It's literally a coin operated meter or voucher system inside the house that you top up like a phone
I would not want to miss the feeling of getting up at 3 am to put a farthing in the meter to keep the room above freezing.
