More Smart meter fail?
The 1st smart meters were the ones where they started transmitting so the guy at the meter spent about 10 seconds less at each meter and then someone spent a far longer time with batteries every few years.
The next take was the custom frequency/sms/whatever meters hacked into normal digital meters which is fine for areas with new rollout where there is decent network coverage but not so good in other places.
The local guys decided to roll out an IPv6 Wimax network for their meters which mostly weren't upgraded. Of course people figured out you could torrent over that network with a card removed from someone else's meter. With billions of IP address IPv6 didn't need security because the address space can't be scanned except that we know all 8 bytes of the /64 network number and 5 out of the low 8 bytes which means hacker search space is just a couple dozen million packets.
Then there is the radio in my brain crazy issues to deal with.
I figured a smart system would put the meters up on the poles were they can talk to each other without much in the way, hard to tamper with, fully under the utility control, cheaper because one meter could do many houses. It would reduce risk to burning down houses when the old meter boards had undetected flaws and there would be some redundancy when the new meter was reading far more power use than the old one because someone put in the wrong current transformers.
/two firey icons and no zappy ones?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
