Millions of smart meters risk going dumb during 3G switchoff

Millions of smart meters in Great Britain risk losing functionality during the 3G switchoff, requiring another potential “mass rollout” of technology, an industry expert has warned.

Currently, the UK’s mobile services use four different ‘generations’ of mobile technology: 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G, with many smart meters using both 2G and 3G technology to communicate.

From this year, networks will gradually begin shutting down their 3G services to make room for the more advanced 4G and 5G technologies.

The smart meter network is divided into three areas in Great Britain – north, central and south. In the north, telecoms company Arqiva is responsible for this part of the network and uses a proprietary long-range radio technology to enable the devices to communicate.

Yet both the central and southern regions are the responsibility of mobile network O2/ Telefonica, which uses 2G/3G for its second-generation SMETS2 smart meters. All regions also contain many SMETS1 devices which use 2G technology.

Matthew Roderick, founder and chief executive of digital services company n3rgy, has warned that in order to properly function following the switchover, millions of SMETS2 devices in the central and southern regions will need their communications hubs replacing, potentially costing hundreds of millions of pounds, while SMETS1 meters will likely need the entire installation replacing.

“We’re effectively building and installing comms hubs in the southern and central regions today that have a shorter lifecycle which obviously will impact costs…you can almost say if we continue this route of installing devices that have a shorter shelf life, you have another mass rollout program potentially,” the former chief technology officer of the Data Communications Company (DCC) told Utility Week.

Furthermore, he said, as mobile operators ‘re-farm’ the radio spectrum of their 2G networks for other purposes this could further constrain the functionality of the communications hubs.

He said: “From a functional perspective if you switch the 3G network off, in theory, the comms hubs will still operate on a 2G network. But their connectivity, bandwidth and capability to provide that data is drastically reduced.

“If we still have 12-13 million comms hubs on the wall when they switch the 3G network off, I doubt very much that the network will function as it did before and whether that future function meets, in a material way, the demand at all is a question mark.”

Roderick pointed to a similar technological rollout in 2016 when the DCC, which is responsible for the smart meter network, introduced Dual Band Communications Hubs to improve network coverage in homes.

He said: “The cost of changing the comms hub technologies to introduce a different Local Area Network (LAN) technology was in the hundreds of millions.

“So you could imagine if we’re doing pretty much the same thing here, but introducing a new Wide Area Network (WAN) technology, I suspect the costs will be potentially similar.”

A DCC spokesperson said: “The upgrade of 2G/3G communications hubs is something that will happen gradually while devices reach end of life. The cost of upgrading end of life hardware is factored into the rollout.

“We have our current contract in place with our SMETS2 communications service provider for central and south with the right to extend. This is there to ensure continuity of service, keeping SMETS2 devices operating as they do today.”