Millions of smart meters will fail when 2G and 3G turns off
Public Accounts Committee demands timetable for replacements, because things have run so smoothly so far...
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".
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
I thought they weren't turning off 2G. What's the benefit? Other than forcing it sooner? Most places that used 2G still get exceptional coverage from it.
I've done this as a project to go from 3G to LTE for a network of a few hundred devices.
3G and LTE (4G) used almost identical AT commands. The motherboards were build so the modems were swappable. It wasn't too bad. I'm told the field techs had to drive 5 hours across the Australian outback to access some of them.
After rolling out 3g router fail over for pokies, lotto, wagering in Oz I'm sure the money they saved from no longer having any downtime can pay for 4G, 5g, and starlink redundancy.
5 hours of driving across Oz? Wouldn't even make Carnarvon Gorge much less Mount Isa.
Beautiful country to drive across tho.
I work on the national electrical grid and there are a bunch of remote sensors in all of the substations. Some of them are what essentially amount to remotely controlled circuit breakers. I think they trip automatically if they lose connection because they assume something bad has happened. So that'll be fun.
I work on the software side of things I'm not an electrical engineer so I have no idea if they're actually changing them over yet but they're still thousands of them on the network at the moment.
I work for the grid too and we also have these. Usually only for bigger substations to transmit measurements and switching states, maybe a bit of telemetry like a tripped fuse.
I hope for dear god that you are remembering wrong and none of them trigger when loosing connection. Whoever thought of that should be immediately fired.
A loss of connection from a single device should never trip a circuit breaker (no idea how the bigger equivalent is called in english), especially if its connected wireless.
I was wondering how this would affect car manufacturers and their TCU's or what have you. Curious to know if cars will be bricked when this is obsolete and they turn off 2G and 3G.
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.
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.
I just wish our meter had a P1 port like they did in some countries
They should have stuck with the mechanical meters. They are reliable and last nearly forever.
Mechanical meters are terrible for tracking real time consumption and managing the grid efficiently. They also pay for themselves because they can catch tampering and don’t require utilities to pay people to bumble around homes to read stupid meters.
Mechanical meters make no sense. They’re a waste of money and not great for a grid that requires intelligence to help get off fossil fuels.
It's cheaper to change all the meters one more time than going back to a human driving his car from house to house to do manual readings...
Also better for the environment.
Lol no
That is the problem. Also there is no MRR with those.
But those don't come with kickbacks!
