Smart Meters

If you could join up all the dots about me, apart from being one helluva mess, you would notice that the wireless issue crops up over and over again. Not necessarily from a telecoms or technical point of view, but more from a communication point of view.

And smart meters are one area where I just cannot understand what is going on, nor why our utilities etc companies don't get together and get on top of the issues.

What are the issues?

OK, from a utility company POV, there is a need to:
1) Be able to easily access the meters and read them for water, electrickery etc without needing to knock on each house door or business premises
2) Be able to spot leakages or wastage easily - whether this be a burst pipe in a school or a household using more than they can afford to pay for

The easiest way to deal with both of these is to have the meters reporting back in to "HQ". And the easiest way to do that is via wireless, or fibre, or "fiwi". It would not be so great to have a meter plugged in to a telephone line as the amount of spare copper is limited, and the meter does not need to report back constantly so the copper would be underused. As a scarce resource, this is not ideal.

(However, if you were to stop using copper between the street cabs and the homes/businesses for voice and data, it might be a damned good use of the copper rather than pull it out the ground and flog it into a lucrative, profitable marketplace. But that is another discussion!)

For homes and businesses, it would be good if the meter could inform them if they were using above average of the utility compared to say comparable businesses in the region, or their neighbours. This might encourage them to cut down on usage and hence reduce their bills.

There is additionally a major problem in the UKl over this stuff called "broadband". The truth of the matter is that we just don't have it. Not compared to places like Korea, Sweden, Italy, Estonia and even Outer Mongolia. And until someone finds a way of getting the owners of the infrastructure to work together using existing resource eg fibre optics, wireless masts, street cabs and exchanges etc, it is highly likely to stay that way. Particularly for the non honey pot type areas, like most of Britain. Look on a map and see how much green there is? No cities or big urbanisations? That's where there is sod all broadband at all.

And this is where smart meters come in. The EU regulated on smart meters to be introduced in 2007, but it seems the Brits haven't quite noticed that piece of regulation yet. Or those utility companies who can put prices up and annoucne £500 million profits a couple of weeks later are jittery about the potential cost.

Now, imagine if every home and business needed its utility meters replacing. We have electricity and water only, but others have gas too. That would be three new smart meters, all dishing out a wireless signal to be picked up either very locally (eg over Bluetooth or similar) by meter readers who didn't have to get out of their vehicles and just needed to kerb crawl to get a reading, or they would be connected into a larger wireless cloud and feed their data back to a data centre or similar for the utility companies. Latest figures have these costing the consumer, not the utility company, at around £180. Yeah right. I don't think so.

There are however issues with smart meters as they are currently espoused. eg one per utility company.

Firstly, the wireless interference between my three utility metres, next door's, and the rest of my neighbours could be a major issue. Secondly, a ton of people would come out of the woodwork saying they now have a permanent headache, or chilblains year round or something because of the wireless and thirdly, it would cost shedloads of dosh, not just to install said meters but also for the data costs and installing wireless equipment to cover the nation with a wireless cloud.

And therein lies the rub. United Utilities, who deal with our water, also own a telecoms company. It used to be called Your Communications, and is now owned and run by Thus and Kingston Communications. So, these electrickery companies are not foreigners to telco games. Apparently, the top wire on all those enormous pylons you see across the country is a fibre optic telco data cable. Even the water companies have dabbled in the telco markets, and you only need look at the furore around H2) and their plan to stick fibre optic down sewers to see that the water companies are in there too.

The problem with communications infrastructure in our country is that no-one seems to be joining the dots. As wireless needs to become more ubiquitous, the mobile oeprators extend their 3G etc networks to bring data coverage, the telcos faff around, generally, with the likes of The Cloud hotspots, (and stealing the term "wireless broadband" so everyone assumes it is that new box BT has just given them and no more), the utility companies just merge with one another, and the odd telco etc, but no-one is joining the dots.

I am going to try to.

1)The need for broadband speed, accessible and affordable and available to all, everywhere in the UK, and fast as hell. Yes... 1Gbps symmetrical, ta.
2) Supposed scarcity of bandwidth whilst we have unused resource in dark fibre lying all over the country and data costs approaching zero
3) Compliance with EU regulation on smart meters
4)The success of wifi mesh networks
5) The fact that the majority of mobile calls are made in the cell the call orginates from or a neighbouring one

Right, let's put this together.

Into my house, you put a smart meter, that measures electricity, gas and water consumption. On that smart meter is a small wireless antenna. The meter can both transmit and receive information. That meter meshes with the meter in my neighbours' houses, and his with the next house and all others it can see, creating a resilient mesh network throughout our village primarily. In our street cabinet (which I happen to know is one 802.11b 8db antenna hop from most of the houses in the village, and 2 from the top of the village), is another meshbox, and some kit to convert from wireless to fibre.

Every smart meter acts as an access point not just for the utility companies but also to provide internet access. Should you wish to have multiple resilience, the local copper sub-loop can provide back ups. However, should this be needed eg if there was a nuclear magnetic pulse which knocked out the wireless, any survivors of the nuclear bomb could expect reduced internet download and upload speeds for a while over the VDSL link. (If the street cabinet were affected by thermo nuclear activity, they'd be back on ADSL which round here is absolutely appalling. But perhaps that would be the last thing anyone would be concerned about....?)

The upgrade programme on the horizon would then obviously focus on fibre in the core network eg between exchanges, (which is mostly done), and then fibre from the exchanges to the street cabinets. Obviously, this would be best piloted in rural areas first on the principle of disturbing the least amount of people at a time. And on the understanding that the EU or Gummint, or some such body would fund the innovative pilot of FTTcabinet roll out. (Innovative in the UK only, most other countries are already implementing FTTH.) Many of the utility companies may find that they actually own conduit in the vicinity of the proposed rural areas, as well as dark fibre, and decide to avoid the exchanges and street cabs entirely. A simple wayleave payment to impoverished farmers and some backhanders to the planners would no doubt see new utility-owned street cabs replacements and alternative exchanges springing up where cows, sheep and pigs once dwelt. This would no doubt be lucrative for farmers and count as 'farm diversity' and be applauded by the planning authorities too.

There would also have to be subsidies for the smart meters, and a compensation plan for the lunatics who think that wifi (or whichver lump of spectrum was used) is going to damage their health. (There may prove to be some mileage in moving them all up to the Outer Hebrides to live under and work on the windmills needed to power London's exorbitant energy requirements. Potentially the whoomp whoomp of the windmills would drive them truly insane.)

The amount of bandwidth required to transfer data to and from the smart meters
could be charged at exactly the same rate as it currently costs in environmental damage and economics to send out troops of meter readers in vans around the nation. The utility companies would need to buy bandwidth from someone, which presumably will be BT and/or Branson, so that would cut them into the pie and not leave them moaning about their lack of involvement in such an important project - even if it is in rural areas firstly.

However, the local transmission of data would cost the utility companies very little as they own the pipes, and they could retrain a few of the meter readers to maintain the networks. Over the last 20 years or so, it has become apparent that UK Gummint has a policy to keep down the unemployed numbers by taking as many on as possible as civil servants so the Gummint could start a whole new department called "Wireless, Access and Communications Complaints Organisation" - the WACCOs for short who deal with everyone who thinks wireless makes them nauseous or affects their appetite.

Right, so we have a wireless mesh access point smart meter in every home, fibre to at the very least the street cabs and exchanges, a wireless cloud over most of the country, EU regulatory compliance, data being fed from the meters to the utility companies, telcos and utility companies using (up to now) untapped and unused resources such as dark fibre), every home with at the very least a 100Mbps symmetrical wireless connection out to the Net with a VDSL failover on the copper, or the copper being ripped out and flogged on the open market at way more than anyone could ever have dared dream (this also stops it being nicked).

What else? A burgeoning knowledge economy etc in rural areas, geeks from towns travelling out to rural hotspots ie most of the countryside to get a decent connection, which would hopefully encourage the train companies to put on a proper train service, a properly used network infrastructure, a few new people in a new Gummint department, and a lot more people in the Outer Hebrides, which will no doubt get better transport links and services to deal with them. With any luck they will start a campaign against the windmills and force London to switch off a few lights for a change instead of ruining a beautiful (if now somewhat over-populated) area of the British Isles. Plus a bunch of psychiatrists relocating to grab the gummint compensated treatment programmes to treat total eejuts.

Anyway, just a thought. Anyone fancy importaing a few smart meters that are mesh enabled and giving British Gas a call before they spend all that profit?