...but the alternative is a return to sending round humans to read the meter...

I'm rather sure that significantly fewer than 9% of the meters were "unread" when humans were in charge of the readings. Not that bringing back the human reader will solve all problems, but the failurism and obsoletism market in technology does sometimes make me think why it is a good idea to use "advanced" technology when simple solutions do the trick very well and perform better.

And it's not as if there haven't been improvements in the efficiency of manual reading..

The customer (or the meter reader if an attendance is deemed necessary) simply snaps a picture of the meter and uploads it to be processed automatically.

A very simple Computer Vision problem solved decades ago, is one of the few sorts of things which modern "AI" is pretty good at.

This train wreck keeps on derailing, apparently. That's exactly how it was programmed from the start.

Now, all those people who didn't want anything to do with 'em are going to have the joy of watching the technician come back and do it all over again.

Planned obsolescence at its finest.

My energy company has started to bug me as my old spinning wheel leccy meter is outside its certification date. I wonder how long I can just ignore them?

The entire smart meter thing has been a farce from the very start. The initial rollout of type 1 meters that were locked to the supplier was just so stupid. And the carefully worded claims that smart meters will 'help you save energy' with the caveat way down the page that all it does it let you see your power consumption and it is up to you to actually take action.

"And the carefully worded claims that smart meters will 'help you save energy' with the caveat way down the page that all it does it let you see your power consumption and it is up to you to actually take action."

That is not entirely true. They allow you to adjust your consumption to dynamic surge/discount pricing periods. Not something I am keen on coping with, but its coming.

It is still up to you to do that. It is all completely mandraulic.

I believe Octopus has/had some IFTTT functionality but no other supplier does. And even then you need to be a bit of a home automation nerd to use it. It isn't like the old economy 7 where the circuit was only live during the off peak period.

What they are relying on is customers not changing their behaviour and falling foul of the surge pricing.

There are a few providers offering dynamic tariffs now. Essentially more advanced versions of the Economy tariffs where you'd get two rates - one off peak, one peak, and allow you to fill your storage heaters over night, run washing machines/driers etc.

Now, it's mostly for charging EVs during off-peak times where there's a power surplus on the Grid.

Frankly, this is what I've been waiting for, and what I was promised with smart meters.

I've been ignoring mine for well over a year.

Yeah, they help you to save money, by stinging you with punitive Time Of Use pricing, so you will stop using electricity, when you would otherwise need it and be using it, for fear of high bills!

"all those people who didn't want anything to do with 'em are going to have the joy of watching the technician come back"

Not quite. It's just that we're still getting phone calls and letters to ignore about installing the first one.

Has any "smart" meter manufacturer come up with a smart meter with modular cellular modem?

Instead of upgrading the meter every time the cellular technology becomes obsolete, maybe the cellular modem can be upgraded instead?

I don't know if they have a modular meter, but ones that use the actual power cables the meter is plugged into to provide the back end networking exist https://www.corinex.com/broadband-over-power-lines Surely these would be a better option than relying on a 3rd party mobile infrastructure?

Plus as 2g/3g get switched off some people may find that the remaining 4g/5g signal doesn't reach the location of their meter anymore since it might be in a basement or cupboard under the stairs and this will create additional problems.

That's exactly how it's done. A comms hub is fitted as well as the smart meter. The hub is independently replaceable.

A friend of mine has a smart meter in Edinburgh. There is no comms hub, or at least no separate one. Just a meter and a remote display which has not worked since the day it was "installed".

the idea was to have a removable module which can be snapped out and replaced, so upgrading will require an engineer's visit but should only take a couple of minutes

AFAIK, that should be true at least for the most recent generation of meters. As it currently stands, the north of the UK uses LoRa, while the southern area is (mostly) cellular so the meters have to be able to work with both technologies

I presume there's a technical reason why it wasn't feasible to use the powerline itself for communication (too many transformers to bridge?) and that "competition" was the reason for having different networks in the north and the south, but I'd have thought that a dedicated network that was "good enough" and could be maintained for a generation would be better than attempting to piggyback on the constantly-evolving mobile network. The contract is in place for a 4G network.

More information on the rather convoluted situation [1]here .

[1] https://www.smartme.co.uk/smets-2.html

It literally states that in the article:

" I believe the idea was to have a removable module which can be snapped out and replaced, so upgrading will require an engineer's visit but should only take a couple of minutes."

It's interesting to consider why they opted for 2G/3G instead of a bespoke network. Meters are generally installed close together, making a mesh network feasible, with a central reader in an electrical box on the street collating data. Such a system wouldn't require much bandwidth—just enough to transmit serial numbers, readings, basic telemetry (like temperature and current), and a cryptographic signature. However, at the time, integrating 2G/3G modules was likely seen as the cheaper option. Yet, this choice begs the question of why they would need the greater bandwidth of 4G, what the energy consumption will be when scaled to millions of devices, and the potential obsolescence of 4G within a decade.

"at the time, integrating 2G/3G modules was likely seen as the cheaper option"

Likely this. Also it gives a good chunk of money to the network operator for providing the service, all from our bill.

Am I the only who, while speed reading, missed the 'c' in "inception".

I almost went to the dictionary to look up the meaning, but reading the rest of the article saved the effort,

Ours never got to "commissioned" - supposed to be covered by Telefonica (aka O2) - but village is a not spot for most providers - still waiting on Rural mast sharing to be fully implemented

JUST why cant the meters hang off Wi-Fi as a option - Have had various reasonable ISP connections for years - now 1GB/s FTTP and have depended on that for mobile (Wifi-calling, etc, and now even rarely used "land line" is a freebee VOIP/App setup.

Our "smart" gas meter has never worked as a smart meter, despite the electricity meter less than 50cm away working perfectly. EDF refused to replace it with a working smart meter, and the incompetent ombudsman suggested that one reason for the problem might be that the gas meter was too far from the electricity meter, and when we sent a photo, they said "they don't have to give you a working one until 2025"....(I'm not holding my breath for that.... especially since we've now changed supplier.) The *only* reason we have smart meters is because we have solar panels installed and it's nice to be paid for the electricity we don't use, so the dumb gas meter is fortunately merely an annoyance.

Because I'd wager less than half the country would be able to configure their meter to join their wifi, particularly after changing ISP, router, or moving house.

Obviously it was someone who clearly was not "smart"!

So.....the designer isn't "smart", but the meter is "smart"! How often do we need to hear this message? Phones, TVs, refridgerators, SUV's........and the beat goes on!

I'm puzzled by we are working with industry to support a smooth transition for consumers when 2G and 3G is switched off at the end of 2033. .

According to [1]OFCOM , Vodafone and EE are killing/killed 3G early this year while Three are turning it off by the end of this year and 02 next year. So what will be left to stagger on to 2033? Are there still 2G networks in operation?

[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/advice-for-consumers/advice/3g-switch-off

2G is actually more likely to outlast 3G by a significant margin precisely because of things like alarms, smart meters and other hardware.

It currently can't legally be used to obtain meter readings (so it's only useful for statistical purposes) but Octopus have a device that talks to your smart meter over Zigbee (how the in-home screen communicates) and then uses your home WiFi to submit readings near real-time - https://octopus.energy/blog/octopus-home-mini/

Combine something like that with the meshing capability and you could probably route quite a few homes through the one connection, on an opt-in basis of course...!

British Gas are probably blaming 1st gen smart meters stopping working due to 2G/3G being phased out, but it is not, it's their own fsck up. I don't know if it is intensional or not though.

Despite having been built in 2017 our house has an 1st gen smart meter. It worked for first year we were with British Gas, then didn't for other suppliers as expected, when we came back to British Gas the meter started being smart again. However about 2 years ago British Gas upgraded their computer system which resulted in not being able to log in for several weeks, then we found they couldn't read the smart meter any more, and they started emailing us every month for readings. Now they are bugging us to upgrade to a 2nd Gen meter, normally using an unintelligible overseas call centre which drops the call half way through.

BTW: We are nowhere near ready to turn off 3G anyway, I was trying to read The Register on the train from Waterloo to the Portsmouth on Monday and it spent most of the time on 2G (so slow it might as well not be connected) or 3G (will display a page eventually), only patchy 4G and no sign of any 5G on O2.

Why should the "billpayer" fund the replacement of these meters, they are revenue measuring devices owned by the power company. The Power company or its shareholders should pay for the replacement, and the CEO should be sacked, or receive no bonuses for 5 years.

Because ultimately the consumers pay for the operating costs of the company, that's how markets work. I'm also not sure sacking the CEO who's probably the 3rd or 4th successor to the guy at the helm when the roll-out started is going to help - particularly when the government were the ones mandating it happen.

About 3 million smart meters cannot currently be remotely hacked and another 7 million will be similarly secured when 2G/3G shuts down.

Still waiting for mine. Every couple of months I ask again.

I'm on a radio teleswitch meter which, for those who don't know, is controlled by a radio signal from Droitwich, which operates on giant valves, which fail after a period of time. The complete worldwide stock of those valves has been purchased by the BBC to run just that radio station, nobody else makes them or could make them any more, and they have said that when the last valve dies, they will shut it down, and thus every teleswitch meter with it.

So you'd think they'd be scrambling to move those customers to smart meters. Nope. Refused every time. And teleswitch meters can only be sensibly handled by a few electricity providers.

Instead each year they see if they still have a spare valve, push the termination date forward another year, cross their fingers and hope. It's happened half a dozen times to my knowledge, despite regular statements that they would start migrating all customers and that Year 20XX would be a deadline for such, and then they just do nothing, blow through the deadline, and will likely cry like babies when it turns off and they demand access to my home to upgrade me to a smart meter.