Power Utility Smart Meters Causing Router Interference

Seems like a bad frequency for smart meters for several reasons. One would think most power companies would use something in a much lower (probably licensed as well) frequency for better signal propagation.

If its a mesh network, the radio is active a lot more than 45 seconds/day - and indeed, the article so states. Where did you get such a figure?

interference is brief since smart meters communicate for less than a minute a day in bursts of a few seconds, according to the utility.

Do electric SmartMeters™ constantly emit RF?
No. SmartMeters™ communicate intermittently, with each RF-signal typically lasting from 2 to 20 milliseconds. These intermittent signals total, on average, 45 seconds per day. For the other 23 hours and 59 minutes of the day, the meter is not transmitting any RF.

the very intermittent nature of their operation makes for the worst kind of interference - random and hard to isolate.

These things are on for much more than 45 sec a day, and are fairly consistently chatting with other nodes in the mesh network on an almost constant duty cycle.

In our neighborhood, the units operate on a 850-900mhz frequency, and that pretty much jammed our cordless phones that had functioned well for many years, and required me to purchase a 6ghz phone to get that functionality back.

Damn nice of them to garbage up the wireless spectrum like that.

These things are on for much more than 45 sec a day, and are fairly consistently chatting with other nodes in the mesh network on an almost constant duty cycle.

In our neighborhood, the units operate on a 850-900mhz frequency,

Damn nice of them to garbage up the wireless spectrum like that.

said by Romney2012
I am sure using unlicensed bandwidth was much cheaper as well as the meters being cheaper to build using std wifi chipsets.

To be fair, the meters only come on for about 45 secs/day, so real interference will be pretty brief unless you live in an apartment complex with dozens of meters chirping away nearby.
[/BQUOTE :

If you live in an apartment complex you should already be screwed on 2.4 Ghz, had to grab SSIDer the other day for my wife, her wireless kept getting knocked off, check ed out the spectrum and wham no safe place anywhere [thanks to comcast supplying wireless combo devices they do not disable even when the sub is not using them [home-whatever = dory with no setup...>], popped over to 5Ghz on her card, and no one, crickets, down to BB to get a 5 Ghz router, and its beautiful now. Of course this is all after I replaced out phone with a dect 6.0 model becasue I though tit may be the issue.

This entire news article is useless and stirring up imaginary controversy for no purpose at all.

If you live in an apartment complex you should already be screwed on 2.4 Ghz, had to grab SSIDer the other day for my wife, her wireless kept getting knocked off, check ed out the spectrum and wham no safe place anywhere [thanks to comcast supplying wireless combo devices they do not disable even when the sub is not using them [home-whatever = dory with no setup...>], popped over to 5Ghz on her card, and no one, crickets, down to BB to get a 5 Ghz router, and its beautiful now.

Seems like a bad frequency for smart meters for several reasons. One would think most power companies would use something in a much lower (probably licensed as well) frequency for better signal propagation.

It's an unlicensed band. That's why 802.11b/g (soon to be the 5 GHz band too) in populated areas is a crapshoot many times.

What is the output power of the smart meters radio.

A wi-fi router's wattage is one-10th of a watt, whereas the repeater, nodes and gateways that support the smart meters are one watt.

Is there anyway to use this hack in to your meter and roll it back a little?

We now have three of these meters - electric, water, gas. I read someplace that some meters use 500 - 600 MHz. Some cable TV channels and HSI download frequencies are in this frequency band. Ingress could be a problem for cable TV and HSI subs. Talked to a local utility worker and he said each meter is read every 10 minutes and that the power was one watt. This seems excessive, particularly for the water and gas meters that use a lithium ion battery, so I'm not sure he knew what he was talking about. What's the power involved in transmitting cable TV or cable internet?

I had some problem with my internet undergoing intermittent drops and finally complete failure. The Comcast tech measured signal noise on the line and found the drop from the pedestal to the house had unacceptably high noise. Replacement of that line solved the problem. The bad drop was behaving as a giant antenna picking up rf noise. I wonder if the noise came from all these 1 watt meters in our neighborhood producing a continuous background of rf?

BPL would seem to have been the best option for this. Power companies could have setup and managed their own networks using the power grid that's already in place. Sure, we all know that they didn't want the hassle of being an ISP, but this would have been a good idea for smart meter networks.

So much interference is already on 2.4Ghz networks that I don't see how they thought this would not be a problem. If these meters cover entire neighborhoods and form a WiFi mesh network, they probably operate at a much higher power level than our home gear.

Who the hell planned this out anyway?

I keep repeating this like a mantra. In the event of a disaster, FEMA and the Pentagon is the agency tasked with setting up communication. Walkie talkies will only serve to facilitate extremely small family coordination until (if) they are rescued from whatever remote location they are in. The military and FEMA will come get your resources first if it is better for logistics. There is a reason the TV show Jericho didn't last for a whole season.

BPL is less of an issue than many think and a NON-issue in the face of catastrophe. It was the lobbying that killed it, not the third eye that it cause to mutate from your armpits.

I've never personally seen issues with the remote meter readers either. Likely this is just another push to pull us back an age or two technologically.

I keep repeating this like a mantra. In the event of a disaster, FEMA and the Pentagon is the agency tasked with setting up communication. Walkie talkies will only serve to facilitate extremely small family coordination until (if) they are rescued from whatever remote location they are in. The military and FEMA will come get your resources first if it is better for logistics. There is a reason the TV show Jericho didn't last for a whole season.

Did anyone click on the Portland Press Herald link in the article? If you do, you'll see a picture of what appears to be an electrical worker with a full head mask and what appears to be a air-filtration mask underneath. Are the new meters that dangerous or is the worker just trying to remain anonymous? Anonymous doesn't explain the air filter is. Is this standard practice during installs? If there's a short-circuit, does burning insulation produce nasty fumes? I thought modern regulations required materials that mitigated some of the nasty stuff during a fire.

The utility only pays wholesale price for the energy going to the grid and we pay retail price for that consumed from the utility company.

They installed smart meters for my electricity and water. Maybe it's just in my mind, but it certainly feels like the meters are going much faster than before and my average bill higher. Has anyone else noticed any difference?

Also, they use electricity to run. Am I being charged for that too?