S2 smart meters in the Northern Territory using the Arqiva network - why isn't the meter able to connect to the WAN?

Good afternoon @bingbongovo2021 .

It sounds like things have been a bit quirky there, but I can definitely try to offer advice.

Firstly, it’s not your fault if the meters aren’t communicating and you shouldn’t be expected to pay for remedial works in order to fix these issues.

I’m afraid it’s not possible for smart meters to use the internet to submit readings. As part of the specs, it all has to go through dedicated and purpose-built networks. There’s more details about how it all works over at SmartMe. We use this resource on the forums a lot, as it helps us out a ton!

As you mentioned Arqiva, that confirms you’re in the Northern Territory. Unfortunately, the EDMI comms hubs used up there don’t support external aerials, so the meter might need to be repositioned in order to get a connection.

This should be free of charge though if it’s the only way to get the smart features to work.

As for an IHD, the Support Team can order one for you, but if your smart meters aren’t working, it’s not possible to pair up an IHD either.

Thanks for the prompt rely Blastoise186, I assure you that I have Ovo’s email saying that I would have to move the meter at my expense if I want my smart meter to work. It certainly isn’t worth that much to me. Doubly so since they point out that the smart meter still may not work in it’s new location.  

Thanks for your link to the specs, and I see that indeed someone has decided that my energy usage is so secret that it can’t be sent over the internet via encoding. Maybe they should use what’s app :-). Seems a bit over the top to me and has obvious shortcomings, as we see. An expensive decision.

It seems odd to me that the smartme site describes in detail the upcoming steps to improve issues with the limited range of Zigbee, but is silent on what happens when the smart meters don’t talk to the WAN.   

The link shows us how many smart meters are installed, it doesn’t show how many are installed and not working, which would be interesting.

Thanks again Blastoise186. Yes, I’d seen that the SmartMe guys are providing a very useful service from their own goodwill. We’re so lucky that people like that step in when providers leave massive gaps in their ‘information’ which is usually little more than an extended sales pitch.

It seems that the LRR solution used by Arqiva should have better penetration into hard to reach areas than GPRS, so it’s odd that GPRS is working and not LRR in our cupboard :-). Arqiva claim 99.5 % coverage - but we live in a decent sized town and the meter is not underground. 

I don’t think it’s a problem with my general location, for one thing Arqiva’s network is supposedly used for emergency services and lifeboat stations, and there is a lifeboat station about ½ mile away. I’ve just seen someone on another forum speculating that powerline adaptors cause interference that could upset the signal - I do have a powerline adapter running as it happens, but if there’s a known problem wouldn’t the Ovo engineer have asked me to turn it off?. Our TV signal is fine with a roof aerial in the loft.

I don’t suggest that the hubs ‘only’ use the internet, I’d just have thought that it could be a backup where the WAN is unavailable. Looking on the web you can find reliable looking reports that up to a third of SMETS2 meters are installed but not ‘smart’.

Don't forget Arqiva operate all of the UK's 1150 TV transmitters, and 95%+ of all radio transmitters, they're not short of sites that can reach your home! 

Thanks for hanging in there @bingbongovo2021 .

Ok, I think I have a final conclusion here. Unfortunately, I can’t find any resources despite digging pretty deep, so this is based only off my own personal knowledge and experience.

As such, I’m also going to ask @Tim_OVO to split this conversation out into a new thread, since it has effectively become a new and unique question by itself. It's worth noting that there have been reports of issues with the Arqiva setup in the Northern Territory, but I would have expected those to be fixed by now.

However, assuming that Arqiva isn’t crashing out, my diagnosis is very much pointed very heavily at HomePlugs and Powerline Networking devices. While Electric Vehicle Chargers can use Powerline Networking to allow the EV and Charger to communicate with each other, this is unlikely to cause issues by itself and I’d be shocked if that was causing nightmares.

Please also note that 802.3af/at Power over Ethernet is unrelated and also won't be a problem. I’ve got a post that’s in draft right now about PoE, which I hope to have out soon. I’ll add some notes about this as well.

The problem with HomePlugs is that they blindly “broadcast” the signal across your entire home - and potentially beyond that - with little to no control as to how or where it goes. As such, if it causes interference, you’re basically out of luck and the only fix is to remove the HomePlugs and migrate to another setup. Depending on your needs, a Mesh Wi-Fi setup might work better these days.

The ultimate problem here is that I suspect the Long Range Radio in the comms hub is getting messed up by your HomePlugs, the latter of which are making no attempt to step out of the way in order to avoid clashes. On top of that, it’s likely to be causing more radio interference by the fact it’s messing up the wiring in your house and creating some other kind of giant transceiver, so to speak. It’s likely to be drowning out anything Arqiva pumps out.

If my theory is correct and assuming your smart meter wasn't commissioned at install, you’ll likely need to ask OVO’s Support Team to commission the meter after you’ve knocked out the HomePlugs. There’s no charge for this service at all, and your meters won't be moved along the way. This is the sort of advice that you’d never be able to get from the Support Team of any supplier directly as it’s beyond their scope.

When you contact the team, please let them know you got advice from me on the forums and provide a link to this thread. I’m well known these days, so the mention of my username should be enough to help you along. If you then give the agent a few minutes to review the discussion, they should have an easier time getting up to speed.

Apologies for any initial confusion! I’ll try to get this moved into a new thread in the morning, to help keep this one focused.

Hi @bingbongovo2021 @Blastoise186 and @MarkC63 - a good read this one, and as requested I’ve moved it into its own topic thread. 

I think we’re not far from getting a ‘best answer’ for this one, although I can’t comment on things like Aqiva network coverage or possible interference. Still it would be interesting to better understand the physics behind things like a powerline adaptors and HomePlugs and how they can effect the Aquiva network coverage…..

I’ve unfortunately been unable to locate any solid references or research for this stuff. It seems that either no-one has really looked into it all from an official or formal capacity, or such research is buried so deep that I can’t find it!

Commissioning a smart meter is basically the process of getting the smart features set up and getting it connected to the network. It is also possible for the meter to work as a traditional meter if this fails, but it wouldn’t do anything beyond simply tallying up your usage.

Mobile phones use a very different frequency to any kind of Long Range Radio that Arqiva has deployed, so they’re probably not affected on the basis the frequencies aren’t even close. If you were in the Southern Territory, this would probably also not be a problem either.

The exact details about how HomePlugs work is complicated and tricky to explain. But the basic idea is that it can turn all the electrical wiring in your house into a giant Ethernet based wired network, without having to run Ethernet cables or network switches all over the house. Compatibility within HomePlugs themselves and other devices has always been kinda weird. Radio devices in particular seem to struggle the most. And even if nothing is going through them right now, the network is still live at all times, unless you unplug all the HomePlugs. I’ve got a friend who has an amuteur radio license, so I might ask him about whether he knows anything.

I also managed to find an old article from The Telegraph that was written in 2011. This seems to add more weight to my theory. This is also backed up by a second article in 2015, again from The Telegraph. While I also admit that Wikipedia isn’t always the most reliable source, the article on HomePlug appears to be pretty accurate. Unfortunately, the original website for the HomePlug Alliance appears to be long gone. This also makes me wonder whether there’ll ever be any further development on this technology, or whether it’s now a dead and abandoned project. Unless there’s evidence to the contrary, I feel that it’s probably best to consider the HomePlug specifications as discontinued. So if there really are interference problems, it’s unlikely they’d get fixed now.

It’s also made more tricky because the HomePlug specifications (such as HomePlug AV) were developed many years before smart meters were even being considered as an idea, so it wouldn’t have been possible to research compatibility between them at the time. Due to the way that these specs work, changing things now would only be possible if an entirely new version of the specification was developed. And I somehow doubt it would be backwards compatible either…

If I was to make a rough guess, the interference from those HomePlugs is probably due to all the Radio Frequency/Electromagnetic Interference from all the noise they make, combined with the fact the signals are probably reaching the smart meter itself and messing up the comms hub. Unlike Ethernet, there’s no way to “force” a network created using HomePlugs to only go directly between the relevant devices - they will blindly spray everything all over the place and cannot be focused or controlled.

This is a good thing of course, if you want to be able to move the HomePlugs around freely and be able to get them connected no matter which power socket you plug them into, but it is also a curse in that all power sockets in the house (and possibly your neighbours too!) are turned into network ports even if you don’t want that. On the other hand, Power over Ethernet only delivers power directly through the network cables to serve the devices that support/require PoE, which helps to prevent this type of interference.

I agree that it’s a bit of a dodgy product on the basis that there’s a lot of flaws in the tech, but unfortunately it’s a bit too late to outright ban them now. In fairness however, their popularity has faded over the years due to reliability and security issues. The last time I saw any setup using HomePlugs (other than my failed attempt) was probably six years ago.

I also noticed that there’s actually a newer standard which is planning to replace and supercede existing HomePlug specification called G.hn . I don’t know much about it, but it also seems like it might suffer the same drawbacks.

However, given the limited power levels of these devices, I wouldn’t be too surprised if any interference was contained to only a small area such a single building. As you get further away from the nearest HomePlug, the signals from it get weaker and less likely to cause issues.

The only way to get definitive proof of my theory, would be for someone to recreate the environment in question and run a bunch of tests while monitoring things with a spectrum analyser (which are really, really expensive!). Other than that, my only real advice would be to try shutting off the HomePlugs and see if that allows the smart meter to start working.

Even if you were to simply move the smart meter elsewhere, I’d be concerned that this wouldn’t fix the issues by itself - especially since the signals from the HomePlugs would likely still reach the smart meter regardless. If you’re happy to try turning them off and then ask OVO to try to commission your smart meter again, at least it won’t cost you anything. If this fix works, then you don’t have to worry about paying for a meter relocation, but if it still fails, then at least we can rule out one possible culprit without incurring costs.

So the community manager thinks the best answer is for us to spend hundreds of pounds moving the meter with no guarantee that it will fix the problem. 

If you are an Ovo employee (it’s not clear to me) you could have asked me where I lived and then investigated to see if any neighbouring properties had working smart meters. At least then you would have been on firmer ground recommending the meter move.

I’m not saying that moving the meter won’t fix the problem, however many, many people have got smart meters with no reception. Rather than forcing (or trying to force) all of them to move their meters a BETTER solution would be to provide a more flexible meter with aerials or some other means of  improving the meters communications.

I’ve had a chat this week with a very good friend of mine, who also happens to hold an amuteur radio license. His advice and thoughts proved interesting.

In his opinion, the use of HomePlugs in this sort of scenario is a possible catalyst that can potentially worsen the issue, but the fact the smart meter is in the basement is the more likely root cause. Both of them combined are probably destroying any chances of getting Long-Range Radio through. You can’t easily blast such signals through so much solid stone/brick after all! If the meter is moved elsewhere, the chances of the signal being blocked should be reduced.

However, he also agrees that Radio Frequency Interference and/or Electromagnetic Interference caused by HomePlugs may be contributors to signal issues. Even though most devices are supposed to be capable of tolerating such interference and dealing with it properly, certain things are more capable than others. And certain devices cause far more than their own fair share of this stuff!

Welcome back @bingbongovo2021 .

As far as I’m seeing things, I’d also be inclined to agree that you shouldn’t be expected to pay for the meter to be moved in this case. If you wanted it to be moved because you wanted to repurpose the basement, then charging for the work makes sense, but not for a fault.

It is still preferable to try and resolve the issue without moving the meter if possible, since it’s less disruptive and much less complicated this way. It’s unfortunate that smart meters using Arqiva can’t use signal boosters either, since that would have probably helped a bit. My recommendation at this point would be to see if anyone can come out and do a site survey and meter health check  in-person. It’s the easiest way to check whether Arqiva’s signal is even reaching the meter at all. If it is, then it could be a dud meter, if not then we at can at least rule that out.

Since I’m pretty certain that the nearby lifeboat station you mentioned gets an excellent signal, it’s unlikely that you’re massively out of range of any Arqiva transmitters - they’ve got them set up all over the UK after all. In some ways, this feels like one of those cases where Beamforming, Beam Steering and Beam Switching techniques might help, but it’s not something you can set up yourself. Assuming Arqiva can even support this stuff, it’d have to be done on their end.

My own UniFi network kit has support for all three of these techniques. The basic idea means that my network kit is capable of using them to “follow” my devices around the environment and direct most of the signal where it’s needed based on where it thinks my devices are, rather than just blindly spraying Wi-Fi all over the place. It generally results in better performance without having to physically move access points around or turn them to face my devices. Due to the high antenna gain, all of my access points are powerful enough to hear my devices regardless of where I am in the building, so these techniques aren’t required.

These features are starting to become more common on Wi-Fi routers and access points these days, but you’re more likely to find them on one that you buy yourself, rather than the cheaply made freebies that ISPs dish out.

If Arqiva is able to do this - and this is a very big if - then there's still a chance that your problem could be solved without messing with the hardware or having it moved. But this probably needs further investigation. Unfortunately, it’s also not quite as simple to do on a giant transmitting station as it is for a bunch of managed Wi-Fi access points. Possible in theory and possible in reality are two different beasts, so it’s unknown whether Arqiva could - or would - do anything to reconfigure their entire system for a single user.

If you haven’t yet done so, I strongly recommend letting the Support Team know about this thread and telling them that I’ve been helping out with advice on this one. The best I can think of is that there’s clearly a puzzle that needs solving here, but it’s unclear as to exactly what the root cause is. And until that’s identified, it’s not going to be easy to solve the rest.

While ISO9001:2015 might be applicable to this sort of thing, not every company in the UK has this accreditation and it only applies to those that do (and they’d also make it clear if that’s the case). I’m not sure if OVO has ISO9001:2015 so I can’t verify the status. @Tim_OVO might be able to query that however.

Hi @bingbongovo2021 ,

That’s definitely not as much progress as I’d have been hoping for either, that I can definitely admit.

A signal strength that low is strange, but I’d have thought it’d still be usable. But without knowing the parameters for each level, it's tricky to say for sure. I begin to wonder what the signal strength is outside and around your house. If that could be checked, it might offer more clues as to what’s going on. I can’t say why EDF cancelled that other appointment, but it’s possible that the cancellation could have been for reasons other than signal issues (such as emergency call outs, engineer off sick, inventory issues etc).

However, I do need to make one or two minor corrections there to clarify a couple of things. I can’t comment on surveys that ask about whether people want smart meters or not, since every single one seems to get different results and are inconclusive/inconsistent.

However, the process that involved designing and building out the infrastructure is more complicated than it seems at first glance, which is why the info at SmartMe proves so helpful and that website is intended to maintain a Neutral Point of View where possible - so much so that it actually does discuss reasons why people do and don’t want smart meters and includes links to websites .that both argue for and against smart meters (and a few other assorted links to websites that are neutral or just provide more context).

However, it’s worth noting that the UK was actually split up into three Regions when it went out to tender, rather than two. It just happened to work out that Arqiva won the tender for the Northern Region, while Telefonica snapped up both the Central and Southern Regions. Strictly speaking, given that it’s still three regions overall, a future tender could go out which later results in three different contracts been awarded to three different vendors (one for each region). It’s purely coincidental that only two vendors won this round.

You probably can’t contact Arqiva directly I’m afraid, they only directly talk to their existing and potential clients on a Business 2 Business basis, they don’t have a Business 2 Consumer or Business 2 Customer service.

So Ovo and I finally decided this was of course something they could not fix, they can only advise Arqiva as above that the signal isn’t strong enough. If Arqiva do nothing then after 6 months Ovo can advise them again, but apparently they have no power to force action. Ovo sent me a deadlock letter to enable me to approach the energy Ombudsman.

The energy Ombudsman advised me that this is not an energy problem, and although they are aware of the problem they have no regulatory power over Arqiva, why not try Ofcom?.

Ofcom told me there is nothing they can do either as Arqiva is not one of their companies. They advised me to complain to Arqiva (been there, no progress) or try trading standards (hmmm, maybe).

I’ve talked to more smart meter installers, who know that this isn’t just a problem with small remote places, but agree that nothing is happening, and the problems aren’t being fixed.