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

Actually I don’t care about the gas meter, and I didn’t say the meter isn’t sending any signals. I want a working smart electricity meter and it seems to be a comms problem. If my meter (comms hub) wasn’t sending any signals then the engineer could have just installed a replacement.

Saying the lack of communication is out of Ovo’s hands, while true, is not good enough. The electricity suppliers are the customer’s only contact point and I really think they have let their customers down in not putting pressure on those responsible to sort out these problems. While the DCC and Arquiva have been publicising over optimistic firgures about the smart meter rollout I feel that the suppliers are the ones who really know how many smart meters have been installed but still have to be read manually. I would love Ovo to publish this number for their customers - it’s easy enough.

Hey ​@bingbongovo2021,

You're definitely not alone in facing challenges with a meter that isn't communicating with the wider network.

It’s totally understandable to feel frustrated, but it's important to have realistic expectations of what OVO can do regarding the DCC. They’re aware of the communication issues affecting customers, and they’re actively working on rolling out the 4G communications hub to suppliers like OVO. Plus, a Virtual Wide Area Network (VWAN) is on the way later this year! If you're interested in learning more about their efforts to support customers with non-communicating smart meters, check out the information available at How we’re working to support customers to address non-communicating smart meters.

I hope this helps 😊

Well, unbelievable, when I saw this VWAN comment I wondered if this is the mesh network that 4G meters can create/use. But no, what it means (why didn’t you just say this?) is a way of using the home broadband connection to contact the DCC. Well, Hallelujah!, someone, somewhere, saw some sense. Sending data out of the house using their telephone connection. I bet there is someone who was in a meeting 15 years ago, who is now thinking - if only they had listened to me then. How much money could have been saved in fees to hopeless Arqiva. 

Mind you of course it won’t help people who are so remote they haven’t got a broadband connection - maybe eventually someone will help those people with a meter that shoots the data back down the power supply lines. Simple, 100% coverage.

In our case I had a long conversation with a lovely person at the Ovo helpdesk, she spent a long time talking to someone (engineers?) and finally suggested that the guy who had installed the 4G meter had used the wrong ID when trying to commission the meter and wanted to send someone round to try again. OK I said. But then a chap rolled up who quite aggressively insisted that he was just there to replace the comms hub AND the electricity meter and didn’t know what I was talking about when I repeated my conversation with the help desk. He was shouting and refused to attempt to recommission the existing hub so I asked him to leave. Maybe I can get one of those VWAN things put in. I wonder how they work. If they talk to the home router then they will need recommissioning every time the home changes broadband provider since each provider gives you a new router…..

Have a think about the security implications of this. The Smart Meter Wide Area Network (SMWAN) is intended to serve just about every household in GB providing secure, encrypted data transfer. DCC makes sure that only those with proper credentials can access a meter on the network. Data transfer over the Internet via the home connection would need a high degree of discipline on the part of the customer to guarantee that no bad actor could find his way on to the SMWAN via a poorly-secured home network. DCC have been working on systems like this for many years, and it’s only in the past few months that one with an acceptable degree of security has been deployed for testing. It’s not as straightforward as you might imagine. 

There was a guy on this thread ages ago claiming tha the solution of shooting the data back down the supply wires couldn’t be implemented due to security issues, despite the fact that several countries have successfully implemented exactly this solution.

Now you say that DCC has only just worked out how to send my data down the broadband connection securely. Well great, except I have been doing transactions down my broadband with banks and financial institutions for years, so are you saying that what is secure enough for  my bank is not secure enough for my energy usage?.

You say think about the security implications. Please explain what these are. I’ve discussed this with other people who simply don’t care about letting anyone know the details of their energy usage. In quite a few homes the meters are installed so the readings can be obtained by any passerby, should they be scared?. The only issue I could envisage is someone actually remotely shutting off the supply, which would be annoying but I’d readily accept that risk to have a working smart meter. 

Your comment on the DCC spending years on working out a way of protecting their network against bad actors doesn’t make sense. For sure DCCs systems have been exposed to the internet for years, just like any other business, and they have been protected, or unprotected, again just like any other business. Basically they didn’t do it because they thought they could let arqiva and the mobile networks take the pain - until they discovered that they are unreliable partners.

The security implications I was referring to aren’t whether your data suddenly become available to some unauthorized third party. That’s pretty trivial in most cases. DCC have worked hard to keep the SMWAN entirely divorced from the Internet. They are rightly concerned that someone could hijack an insecure modem/router in someone’s house and acquire a gateway into the SMWAN, with implications for the security of what is in effect critical national infrastructure.  I think they’ve been forced to abandon their ‘no Internet ever’ stance in the face of pressure from politicians and activists to make smart metering available to even more than the 99.3% of households already covered.
  

Do you have any basis for this statement? Yes, DCC have a public-facing website, but that doesn’t mean to say that the network they’ve been managing for a decade has had any Internet connection. 

There was a brief scare a few years ago when someone found IP addresses somewhere (in their connection logs, perhaps) that were owned by the Ministry of Defence. I was contacted by an MoD official to explain that the IP addresses concerned referred to devices that had never been connected to the Internet, and gave me a completely plausible explanation for why these IP addresses had shown up where they shouldn’t have. It is quite possible to run a national communications network that is totally independent of and divorced from the public Internet.

This 99.3% and other similar figures are completely without merit in this argument. If you are rolling out technology that you are saying will help everyone save money, and what’s more allows users to have free electricity, then 100% is your target and anything less is simply not good enough. 99.3% means 700,000 or so households without access to smart meters. This should have been clear from the start.

Many users have been told that their meters don’t communicate because they are in obscure parts of the home. Of course they are!. The cables come into the home underground and the meter is positioned near this entry point. Anyone could have foreseen that most meters would have a house on top of them, and designed the solution appropriately. The minutes of the relevant meetings would make fascinating reading.

Of course I have no evidence that the DCC have an internet connection, and I worked in IT for airllines when they had worldwide networks decades before the public internet. My point was that the DCC very likely have internet connections and they take security precautions including firewalls to protect vital data and processes, like any other business. It was obvious from the beginning that the mobile/LRR solution was not going to be good enough so they could have spent years designing adequate security.

The solution of using an aerial seems simplest and avoids the security problem, a simple length of wire allowed reception of radio signals from thousand of miles away. As an administrator of this forum perhaps you can point us all to an article explaining WHY we are ending up with the crazy system that is evolving here.  

Morning ​@bingbongovo2021, I hope you’re well.

Have you heard back from our Complaints team yet, and have you had another appointment booked at all?

Yes, there is a complaint ongoing and the complaints team are following my problems. Another tech has just visited to try and sort it out. He says the 4G hub was working, and the smart meter was showing 3 bars, so everything SHOULD be OK, except it wasn’t, so he has moved the comms hub a few inches thinking the signal there might be more reliable. He says he can’t work out what is going wrong because the systems at the DCC are down!!!!!. So he’s gone home recommending that the smart meter be replaced, even though he can’t find anything wrong with it, with the possibility that it all may spring into life when the DCC problem is fixed. 

Good News, we now have a working smary meter and in home display!.

An Ovo engineer came to the house and diagnosed the problem on the doorstep before he even saw the setup!. He realised that a smart meter installed in Febraury 2021 would not have the firmware required to talk to a 4G comms hub installed in 2026.

Changing the meter fixed the problems immediately and everything fired up straight away.

He said this was common knowledge among the installers, but obviously the help desks and in house ‘tech teams’ aren’t aware, or else they would have changed the meter when the 4G comms hub was installed in May. I realise that the problem might have been fixed in late May when an engineer came to replace everything, but he was so combative and wouldn’t explain what he was doing that he couldn’t go ahead.

So, if you get a new 4G comms hub and still no connection to DCC, ask the engineer to replace the smart meter as well, especially if it’s a few years old. 

I agree you would expect these things to be backward compatible, but hey, it worked for us.