All for one

The smart meter initiative misses the opportunity to provide the UK with a universal platform for connected services, says Adam Westbrooke.

At Easter, the government published its latest thinking on the implementation of smart meters. Overall, this represented a continuation of the direction outlined in previous consultations, especially with regards to the communications aspects of the smart meter programme. But does the current plan for smart meter communications represent the best direction for the UK to move in, or has it been distorted by the way the industry is managed and regulated in this country?

Before we start looking at how smart meters will communicate, it is worth taking time to look at how the problem has been defined. The smart metering programme as run by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) is primarily concerned with communications to and from the smart meter itself, and how the data transferred can provide benefits to the consumer. While there is a (largely still undefined) acceptance that some of the data will need to be

made available to distribution and transmission ­operators, there is a clear assumption that the smart meter does not form part of the smart grid alongside the other physical supply assets, but is part of the retail domain, and as such is very close to being a ­consumer device.

The communications architecture as proposed is as follows. A smart meter (whether gas or electricity) communicates to a utility-provided communications hub within the home. This then links over a wide area network provided by one of the regional communications service providers to a central data communications company (DCC). From there, data is made available to the energy retailer, the distribution network operator (DNO) and any third parties to whom the householder has granted permission.

As all technical and commercial issues are not final yet, this architecture will be built in phases, with early smart meters connecting directly to the utility, then via the DCC, and finally (largely to support a large scale gas smart meter rollout) the local communications hub will be added.

The requirement for a central DCC here arises for two main reasons. First, the competition model in the UK means consumers must be able to change energy supplier easily, and hence the management of the meter will also regularly change. A central data company provides a level of abstraction from these real world issues, because all utilities will be connected to the DCC all the time, so the only change is which data is requested by each. The second aspect is the provision of a customer’s data to multiple companies, and ensuring that not only is this done securely, but in a way that consumers will have faith in. Using a central, independent and non-profit-making body to control this should make it easier to allow multi-party access to customer data, and neatly sidesteps the issue of the lack of trust the public at large have in the main energy providers.

The underlying requirement for smart meter communications can be described very simply. A device in every house in the country needs to exchange small amounts of data from time to time with one or more external companies. This exchange needs to be timely, but does not necessarily need to be instantaneous. It is more akin to text messaging than a telephone call. Importantly, the cost also needs to be subsumed within that of the service being provided. In other words, the communications costs are met by the provider and not by the consumer.

What immediately becomes apparent is that utilities are far from the only companies with this requirement. Digital television companies have been trying to solve the problem of a universal backhaul network for many years, to enable interactive programming direct from the television or set top box. Home automation, security and management companies also need the same type of communications. The growing telecare sector, providing services such as remote blood pressure or weight monitoring, has the same underlying requirement.

Finally, the falling cost of hardware to sense or measure is leading to new devices coming to market all the time that automatically watch, monitor and control an ever expanding range of things.

While there are many markets that could take advantage of such a national infrastructure, none of them are large enough on their own to justify the investment in creating it, and none of the companies involved are large enough to fund it. Smart metering, a programme backed by the government, is capable of making such an investment commercially viable. If the programme delivered a simple supplier-contracted connection into every house that could be used for any type of service, many new business opportunities would arise. The contracts for smart metering communication to the home could be used to provide a commercial incentive to the creation of a more open universal network capability of very low bandwidth, low cost virtual circuits to every house.

What would this network look like to the consumer? The ideal technology to deliver such a service would be fixed rather than mobile. We have already seen the extension of the phone socket in the house from a single voice connection to one supplying both voice and broadband services. Extending this to include a low bandwidth supplier link as well would be an obvious choice. Connectivity within the home could easily be wired or wireless, and the issues involved in the choice of technology are very similar to those that will have to be addressed by the smart meter communications hub. It is important to note that such a service would be standardised at the connection point in the house, but could use any communications link for the wide area connection, so long as data could be delivered to the correct location.

Commercially, such a service could be provided in parallel to existing telecoms companies by a national provider, but a more logical solution would be for all telcos to have a service obligation to provide the capability (both in terms of the in-home connection and wide area backhaul) alongside any services they already provide to a house. All parties wishing to use the data link would be obliged to use the household chosen supplier, maintaining consumer choice in the telecoms sector.

While the current architecture of the UK smart meter programme is likely to work, it is currently a missed opportunity to provide a platform for 21st century connected services for a wider market than energy supply. The reasons behind this are more about the political and commercial difficulties of managing a national project across industries, government departments and regulators, than about the technical feasibility. The adoption of new cloud-based services with physical devices in homes, including security, health and even energy management applications, risks leaving the proposed smart meter network proprietary and isolated within a single industry and not able to adapt to a changing world.

Adam Westbrooke is principal consultant at Scaled Insight, a strategic technology solutions company specialising in large-scale data capture, communications, analysis and presentation

This article first appeared in Utility Week’s print edition of 4 May 2012.

Get Utility Week’s expert news and comment – unique and indispensible – direct to your desk. Sign up for a trial subscription here: http://bit.ly/zzxQxx