RTS is ending

[Stan]

I use economy 7 as I still have the old dumb meter. That is, we get half price power between midnight and 7am. I have asked Octopus for a smart meter but it has not appeared so far because of poor signal reception. One advantage is that over the years the cut-off time has drifted to 7.55am in winter which is really handy for showers.
Octopus has just sent this update:-





So can I assume that a new stronger signal will replace RTS?

[Stinsy]

The whole smart meter rollout has been a debacle. We are stuck with poor choices made early on.

There is no need to be in the situation where smart meters simply don’t work for the huge number of people outside signal range. For example they could’ve designed the smart meters to connect to your WiFi, or to a smartphone and the data uploaded when the phone has internet access.

[Bugtownboy]

I read somewhere last week that there's also a North:South divide in the way they work - ones in the South functioning better.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq52382zd1no

The whole rollout hasn’t been the best, has it !

[dan_b]

I can understand why a piece of national infrastructure was designed to be on a completely separate comms network to personal domestic wifi connections - the potential for hacking/abuse/fraud/cyber attacks through those routes would be massively increased.

But I can't understand why the comms backbone for the smart meter system was two separate systems - 3/4G in the South/Midlands, and FM radio in the North.

[Thebeeman]

I can understand why a piece of national infrastructure was designed to be on a completely separate comms network to personal domestic wifi connections - the potential for hacking/abuse/fraud/cyber attacks through those routes would be massively increased.

But I can't understand why the comms backbone for the smart meter system was two separate systems - 3/4G in the South/Midlands, and FM radio in the North.

From I've gathered it's because the Cell network oop north is less well covered than down south so the easy/cheap option was the 2 systems, until the media picks it up and creates a public issue out of it the consumer will be P'd on. For the Panorama prog/customer Octopus fitted a cell based meter in Glasgow to solve his problem (against the regs).

[Stinsy]

I can understand why a piece of national infrastructure was designed to be on a completely separate comms network to personal domestic wifi connections - the potential for hacking/abuse/fraud/cyber attacks through those routes would be massively increased.

But I can't understand why the comms backbone for the smart meter system was two separate systems - 3/4G in the South/Midlands, and FM radio in the North.

All those security concerns are invalid. We use the internet and wifi for all other aspects of life. There are plenty of mature solutions to ensure security.