Not only will nobody loose their job over this, but I expect everybody involved to still receive their full bonus.

Not sure too many people got bonuses for this. Energy suppliers didn't want them, and didn't want to be responsible for the roll out. Government ignored them, because like so many bad ideas it has a "supports net zero!" sticker on the business case.

The fundamental problem was that government picked smart meters as a winning technology. In the mind of those who conceived this, the world was going to be full of "prosumers" who both produced electricity and consumed it, and smart meters would enable the payments for microgeneration as well as charging for consumption, it would fit well with a world where energy prices decreased when the sun came out, or went up when the wind stopped blowing. The fact that most people don't want erratic energy prices that fluctuate according to time of day, time of year and prevailing weather mattered not.

The actual benefits to most consumers are precisely nil, and yet government still insists that this stupid idea is generating billions of pounds in consumer benefits. I've worked in senior strategy roles for a couple of energy suppliers, you don't think I gave up my mechanical meters, did you?

The "net zero" is just an excuse, just like "think of the children" when they push for Online Safety Bill.

The goal of these things is plain and simple mass surveillance. They want to know where people are at all times, what they talk about etc. and they want tools to enforce obedience.

Did you tell your friend that you dislike the party? No hot water for you and your friend tonight.

Etc.

If one were to believe the propaganda adverts surrounding them, then these things magically make your appliances use less electricity, whilst also miraculously turning coal and gas-fired power stations into some sort of fantastical zero-pollution infinite energy generating factories.

I know this to be true, because they've got someone doing a poor impression of Albert Einstein in them, and a really funny gag about time machines. Chortle.

Meanwhile, the bullshit-o-meter is spinning so fast, that could be used to generate electricity itself...

Most of the adverts do say that user action is required.

The ads NOW say user action is required

(I'm guessing ASA mandated)

what action?

stop what I'm doing?

turn shit off that needs to be on?

sit in the dark?

not sure the fuckers who decided on this live in the real world!

Hopefully the Tories will get in at the next election and save us from the years of this woke Corbynist government

I think some people's irony detectors might be broken there, judging from the down-votes you have gathered. Either that, or the three remaining El Reg readers who still vote Tory took exception.

I assumed the reg's Tories were the ones upvoting

government picked smart meters as a winning technology

Government picked smart meters as a winning concept and insisted on their being rolled out despite the technology. The first generation of smart meters (SMETS1) were largely useless, though they've been mostly upgraded.

The second generation use dedicated communications networks. In Scotland and the North of England, Arqiva provide a mesh network. In the South of England, Capita manages a private network on top of 2G/3G (O2) which will eventually transition to Vodafone's 4G network, assuming the government doesn't do an HS2.

Quite why we have had a throwaway generation of meters and three different and incompatible networks escapes me. I suppose we should be grateful it's not all linked together by Airwave.

They won't transition to Voda 4G without the expensive upgrade in TFA.

The whole point is that the actual meters have 2G/3G modems in, requiring the network to be up. Practically speaking, what will happen is that O2 will be compensated for keeping the obsolete network up.

I would suggest getting an O2 SIM to keep your old phone working, but we tried that, and the coverage is so poor that I'm amazed any smart meter works.

the meters do not have the 2G built in. SMETS2 meters and most SMETS1 meters have an exchangeable communications module.

"Quite why we have had a throwaway generation of meters and three different and incompatible networks escapes me. I suppose we should be grateful it's not all linked together by Airwave."

Because government was so obsessed with the benefits of competition, they unbundled metering from the distribution system operator function. Which mean DSOs had to undertake metering at arms length or outsourced, and were told to keep their beaks out of smart metering. Then unlike every other country in Europe (if not the world) government forced energy suppliers to fit them. Energy suppliers had no field capability, and didn't want to own the meters, government didn't care, and so there's now a bugger's muddle of multiple meter owners, multiple different meter makers, two set in stone and obsolete specifications, a range of meter reading services (smart meters still require a visual read every two years). The technology is owned by the circa 9-10 big meter makers, the SMETS spec is owned (in effect) by government, the meters are read by....... because customers change supplier, each supplier has customer using a range of meters it didn't choose, and doesn't own etc etc ......yeah, you get the general drift. Then there's poor design decisions like gas meters that are battery powered, and whilst the battery can be replaced, by the time it runs out the meter is a circa seven year old piece of techno-junk. Every aspect of the programme was micro-managed by government, and mis-managed by the same.

So there's the problem: Government believe that EVERYTHING is better if there's lots of companies involved, but apart from that they didn't understand how the energy industry works, how it is structured, who has what capabilities, nor do they understand the ephemeral nature of technology, nor anything of what mattered to customers.

"I suppose we should be grateful it's not all linked together by Airwave."

To be fair if we did... at least there would be basically noone in a position that the device couldn't communicate.

I'm somewhat surprised that they *still* can't just piggy back off your home network - it's not as if VPNs are a novel technology at this point.

The benefit is to skimp on grid upgrades, and to not invest in generating capacity, then to effectively implement "voluntary" load-shedding by surge-pricing electricity.

"The benefit is to skimp on grid upgrades, and to not invest in generating capacity, then to effectively implement "voluntary" load-shedding by surge-pricing electricity."

Actually no, there's a shed-load of money being spend on grid and generation. Ofgem rubber stamped programmes costing tens of billions of pounds for distribution and transmission improvements, along with billions thrown at the UK's pointless solar programme, and the huge wind programme. You just have no visibility of that, nor control over it.

...and "voluntary" load shedding by switching you off remotely. Check the small print.

My smart meter saves me loads of money. I am on a tarrif where the price changes several times per day and I charge my home battery when it is cheap. Eventually I will export when it is expensive which will aid the entire grid by smoothing the load.

Until your batteries wear out. How many cycles they good for?

I avoided smartmeters until moving into the current flat, which already had them so couldn't avoid it. A couple of months ago both of them (gas and electricity) seemingly stopped reporting their readings and I've been getting 'estimated' bills. The supplier seems in no hurry to actually resolve the issue and seem to want me to manually read them. Nope - the sole (minor) benefit from smartmeters is not having to read the meters (these ones are outside), so if I've got to have them they can make sure that they bloody work!

Only the metre readers, I think mine is read by a metre reader once a year.

Short-staffed?

> Only the metre readers, I think mine is read by a metre reader once a year.

That must be the most height-discriminatory comment made on El Reg for quite some time...!

"... the most height-discriminatory comment ...."

Well it's just about to be dwarfed by this one!

Linguine reader?

It is amazing how fast things become obsolete these days.

The "technological progress" is matched by how often we need to replace gadgets. Sure, modern stuff can be better, but the total cost-benefit calculation over a device's lifetime doesn't look good. I'd argue that the costs are higher, once you take total cradle to grave resource usage into account.

The government want technology to be "future-proof", so choose something currently in use, but not directly under their control. Technology marches on and future will task itself to prove them wrong about the "proof" part.

"future-proof" is one of the most meaningless bullshit terms out there. It's never applied to things where it might actually apply (a kettle, say, or a fridge), but to gadgets or software in fast-moving markets - things which are pretty much guaranteed to be old-fashioned in five years'time and completely obsolete in ten.

Five years?

Buddy, get on with the times, it's only 1 year now. I'm still not sure if this 1 year is about old-fashioned or obsolescence, the jury is still deciding.

The legal definition of 'future-proof' is 'obsolete at the moment of end-user purchase or installation.'

It should never be phased out.

It should never be phased out

Does anyone actually have firm plans to phase out 2G? 3G, yes - EE keeps sending me texts telling me I need to upgrade my phone as it's 3G-only, despite the fact that I actually swapped it out about six months ago, got a new SIM from EE and (after a short period where it seemed to be restricted to 4G) have been using 5G ever since. I get the feeling that it's entirely possible that some networks will just leave 2G hanging around until the equipment dies :-)

M.

It should never be phased out.

A problem no one seems to mention: 2G in general provides higher signal strength than 4G or 5G. A quick internet search leads me to believe that the difference is typically about 10db. So, even if all the meters are replaced/upgraded, it's likely that some of them still won't work. That's consistent with my experience here in the US. When 2G was turned off early this year and I was forced to switch to a more modern phone, my cell phone service at home went from marginal (i.e. only in some places outdoors when the phone was held just right) to non-existent. Walking and driving around the neighborhood and checking 4G signal strength suggests that most of the homes probably aren't going to have a usable 4G signal without directional external antennae and maybe, in some cases, ampliifiers.

Not that I think it matters much. As far as I can tell, no one seems to actually know how to use "smart" metering to any useful purpose.

2G carries better because it uses the original lower frequency bands, not because of the way data is handled. I think I saw a report that the carriers were going to re-use those bands for 5G instead, in which case it would have the same reach. Not sure if that's true though.

2G carries better because it uses the original lower frequency bands, not because of the way data is handled. ...

Yes, the lower transmission frequency surely helps considerably, but I should think that the lower bandwidth of 2G (200KHz?) vs 4G/5G (several MHz?) would result in lower signal to noise ratios exclusive of lower attenuation due to lower frequency. That's probably simplistic. What am I ignorant of/overlooking?

2G also has a ton of security issues and operational overhead. It is a technology that's been in use for over 30 years.

The IoT component of 5G is meant to be the replacement for 2G networks and really is a pre-requisite to any 2G shutdown if we want to avoid the chaos that happened in the states when they shutdown their 2G network. The only operator that's really embraced NB-IoT is Vodafone although the others are playing catchup. Some form of LPWA network was always going to be the ideal technology for smart meters and other elements of smart cities.

2G (GSM) has actually been much updated in the light of the security issues surrounding its earlier incarnations. The original specifications were designed around the amount of compute power that could be put into a battery powered devices back in the late 1980s, early 1990s, so the crypto algorithms used were just about good enough to ensure adequate security for subscribers and networks, Now, over 30 years later, we can do much better and so the GSM standards have been updated to use much better crypto algorithms.

The operational overhead is more subtle. GSM had astonishingly low operational costs, largely because network planning / expansion was so easy (the standards designers really knew what they were doing when they wrote GSM). And these days it is trivially easy for a base station to support GSM and, say 5G; the compute load on the base station to support GSM is also pretty trivial compared to what they're packing today to run 4G, 5G. However, the use of valuable and limited spectrum resources for only 2G is perhaps the unconscionable aspect; 4G, 5G are so, so much more spectrally efficient compared to GSM that the "lost opportunity" operational cost is indeed very high.

IdiotofThings? No, just fucing NO!

Look at the label on the device. It will tell you how many kilowatts the device consumed. Multiply by the number of hours you use it and your rate per kilowatt hour and voila you know how much it will cost you.

The only real benefit of smart meters is the leccy company can resource action Thier meter readers.

In Spain smart meters are universal and at no extra charge to the customer (some cents per month rental).

The UK really is on its way to being a third world country.

It is possible to deduce usage patterns when you operate various appliances, such as kettles, washing machines, personal massagers, microwaves, etc., based on their energy footprints.

This information can also indicate whether you are home and provide a general idea of your activities.

Smart meters are a critical component of mass surveillance systems and form the foundation of social credit system.

"In Spain smart meters are universal and at no extra charge to the customer (some cents per month rental). The UK really is on its way to being a third world country."

How does this work? You state there's no real benefit, then declare that because Spain have foisted them on everybody that means the UK is on a slide to becoming a third world county?

You've missed out the bit about where Spain did no cost-benefit analysis (FWIW) on the programme before starting, and after the programme finished were unable to supply EU authorities with any information about how much the programme had cost. All of which rather suggests that despite the UK fiasco, the title for third world decision making resides somewhere well south of London.

no extra charge to the customer

Really? So where does the money to pay for them come from? Do Spanish power companies have magic money trees that those in other countries don't?

if you're not paying for the product, you are the product

"Do Spanish power companies have magic money trees that those in other countries don't?"

Yeah Scottish Power

"no extra charge to the customer (some cents per month rental)"

is not the same as

"no extra charge to the customer"

And 'some' cents per month could add up quite a bit - eg 80c/mth over an expected device lifetime of 25 years is E240

"And 'some' cents per month could add up quite a bit - eg 80c/mth over an expected device lifetime of 25 years is E240"

But what's that supposed to cover, and what it the NPV? I can't see a smart meter lasting 25 years. If it's a gas meter it'll need three swap outs for battery replacement and recalibration, if it's electricity then it's likely it'll need a replacement at ten years for recalibration to stay within certification (assume Spain follows generally accepted electricity practices). Even though the replaced meters are not expected to be brand new, there's still the cost of a visit to replace, the recalibration costs, the logistics and scheduling of manpower and meters. Add that to the cash cost of original installation, interest on the capital employed, systems costs, and I'm guessing 80c a month doesn't come anywhere near.

In Spain smart meters are universal and at no extra charge to the customer (some cents per month rental).

And there you have your charge to the customer, smart meters have a higher rental cost than old meters (81c + VAT vs 54c + VAT/month).

There was also [1]question of encryption , which hopefully has been fixed by now.

Still, there are lots of tariffs which charge differently depending on time of day.

[1] https://securityaffairs.com/29353/security/smart-meters-hacking.html

"And there you have your charge to the customer, smart meters have a higher rental cost than old meters (81c vs 54c a month)."

Well, except that 27c won't cover the cost of installing a smartmeter. EU data gives an average across all available information from multiple countries of about €170 per meter. So it seems that Spain are doing what everybody else is doing, and hiding the costs in other charges to customers.