this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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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. 😄
US