Why we needed far smarter meters and thinkers

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Smartgrids and smart meters are gonna be buzzwords this year, (finally - thanks Chattanooga for JFDI) as the competition hots up to reach consumers and achieve EU Policy requirements for energy - which as I recall were supposed to be satisfied by 2008. But, we are miles out with our thinking. Or some are.

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com


Chattanooga has shown the way by combining smart grids plus gigabit FTTH. We ignore such examples at our peril, I believe.

Imagine that you had a chance to install "a device" in every single premises in the country. And, just like the meters before them for electricity, this device will be in situ for years. (Mine is, I think, made of Bakelite or similar, and has Norweb on it so it could have been there since 1948! I know it hasn't - I can read too, folks. But it could have been.....)

The FT is reporting today about the partnerships for smartmeters that are springing up. The only mention of anything even vaguely 'smart' is the addition of GPRS. Where are the joined up thinkers in the electricity and utility industries these days???

Put in a smart meter, as in those I heard about in Denmark in 2004/5, that included a wireless antenna. Not so the meter reader can access the meter, but so it creates a wireless mesh network.

The Danish examples had wifi and Bluetooth (well, they had to have Bluetooth in Denmark - he was a Danish king), but why not add options for GSM, 4G, LTE, wimax and a femto cell for seriously joined up thinking?

[Who cares which wireless techs it actually includes, but stick a card slot in the side so it can be updated for all the new techs if you need forward compatability. Or upgrade, shock horror, over the network you have created. Remote upgrades are hardly new, especially in the mobile/wireless industry.]

The point is, we are missing a very serious trick. My house is, unsurprisingly, right next to my neighbours. On both sides. (Odd that!) It is within less than a mile of nearly every other house in the village. It is within 2 miles or so of pretty much every property in the Parish.

A tiny, tiny, tiny, minority of homes and businesses cannot see a single other property around them. Ditto those on grid electricity and water (Oooh look, I've just reduced the Final Third to a Final 0.001% who cannot be served directly from the SmartGrid - sorry, BT).

To put it in plain English: here is THE chance to build a wireless cloud (of multiple flavours, if we chose) which can then be fed by fibre. As they planned, and presumably built, in Denmark (I cannot find a link to the town where this happened, and would appreciate my lovely readers help in doing so....My Danish extends to bluetooth and forkbeard!) - a big fibre ring round town, smart meters in every house creating the RF wireless mesh for INTERNET connectivity.

Now, *that* is a smartgrid. Not just serving the utilities, but also the telcos, mobile operators (who are also telcos, lest we forget), the consumers, the environment, convergence, mobility, data usage etc etc etc.

So, where are the links to the consultation on the official specs of what smart meters should look like in the UK?

Because I think we should all be preventing a serious fup (no, not fair usage policy!) which will affect consumers to the tune of a fair few hundred quid each, slow down smart grid development in the UK, and hinder us yet further by permitting telcos to play in this space at their own speed.

Can we afford, once again, to not exercise the 'smartness' and innovation that used to exemplify British thinking? If I can come up with this in the middle of nowhere in Cumbria, surely some overpaid exec in the midst of things in the utility industry and government can see the potential of joining up a few dots?

Actually, whilst we are on the subject, why not hold on the BDUK money until we can have an innovative pilot that really does join the dots by including smart grids?

(Send in the trolls......)



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The energy and thinking behind the paradigm shift

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Read more! Graham Small of AFL Fujikura has contributed after he 'let slip' that AFL Fujikura were involved in the Chattanooga smart grid.

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com



Unless you have been off-planet, you will know by now that Chattanooga in Tennessee launched a 1Gbps network on 13th Sept to residents and businesses. It has been a collaboration between the electricity company, the community and a global fibre company. It shines the light for every other country, region and community to follow.

Graham writes:

When the utility companies get together with high tech fibre companies then real paradigm shifts can occur….

We have a huge communications and utilities infrastructure in the UK that reaches just about everyone in our nation. Every utility we have provides some means of delivering an optical fibre into someone’s home. Some are tried and tested – a physical drop into a customers premises via duct or aerial means, via the water system (mains or waste) or via the mains gas (optical fibres are inert, non-radiating or likely to produce sparks). The associated trunk infrastructure provides the ideal highway for core and backhaul if we have the wit but to utilize it. BT isn’t the network – there are alternatives!

Once every home has an optical fibre then the possibilities are endless. From the utilities perspective this is an ideal medium for “smart metering” and a huge cost saving in sending a ‘man in a van’ to every household to check the gas, electricity or water meter. We already have bundling of gas, electricity and telephony through utility providers so why not the fourth utility? Indeed, do we even need computers to enable the internet? Cloud computing suggests that we don’t necessarily need our clunky old PC to do everything we want to do “on line”; how about “Smart TV” that provides a fully integrated communications platform offering Telepresence and truly Unified Communications?

This is the dawn of the age of the Stupid Network. Fibre is the conduit that can provide the catalyst for a new age. Think Caxton’s printing press through to the age of manned space flight. We are at the start of another exponential growth spurt breaking down barriers between people, communities and countries; between the voters and their Governments; between health professionals and their patients; between entertainers and the entertained.

OK people, let’s get smart - the view that connecting people to the internet is all about Facebook and Foxy Bingo is dead wrong. It is the catalyst for social evolution and a template for building an Arthur C Clarkian utopia. The industrial revolution was a catalyst for major social change, fuelling the brawn drain from rural communities to the “dark satanic mills”. The communications revolution will fuel a mass migration back, mitigating the need for mass conurbations and providing opportunity for our talented youth to develop 21st century businesses based on 21st century technology.

It takes a BIG Government to enable a truly BIG Society if it can appreciate the BIG picture!



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Finland, Twitter, Dead Trees.

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Read more! It was interesting to watch this story break on twitter yesterday. Finland to get broadband as a legal right.
Many websites carried the story and tweeted the link throughout the day. It was actually 6 hours down the line before the journos got it on the newspaper sites, (presumably because they would have to check and verify) and a further day would pass before it appeared on dead trees. A month will pass before it appears in a magazine. The power of twitter, the power of the web, and another example of why everyone needs access to this utility, broadband and all its tools. Without reliable internet access how can a rural business keep up with competition? Many are still on dial up. Read more!

Why UK broadband should be just like our electric utility

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Read more! At the Colloquium last Thursday, there was an overwhelming vote to have broadband defined, managed and promoted as a utility... and there is an interesting parallel

Electricity is a utility. We all regard it as ubiquitous. It may not always be affordable but you can at least control how much you spend by how many devices you plug into it. However, it reminded me of a recent conversation with an ex-pat in Spain, who pointed out that at least here in the UK, we can pretty much plug as much as we want in, whereas in Spain you can't.

During the colloq, I made a quick call to Spain to get the figures. As far as my ex-pat friend could recall, in Spain each house gets 2.2KW. Here in the UK, each house gets 25KW thrown at it. Therefore, we can keep plugging things in all day long and the power supply can cope - unless we go totally mad and have untold devices all consuming wattage at the same time. However, were you to exceed the need for 25KW regularly, the electricity company would upgrade your system, because you would be paying for it. (Or so I was told on the steps of the Guildhall).

Just for once, in the UK, we seem to have got away from false scarcity. We need to do exactly the same with broadband as we do with electricity.

Throw as much as possible at every home in the UK.

If people don't use it, then that's fine. It doesn't cause any problems if each house is not using the full capacity. They pay for what they consume with electricity. If, however, we were in the same situation as properties in Spain where you can only have a certain number of devices plugged in at once, there would be uproar. Because, of course, we are used to having a fairly sophisticated electricity supply to our homes. OK, it may spike and surge, but it is still 10 times more wattage than a domestic property in Spain can hope for. The uproar about our impoverished broadband is now growing as we compare ourselves with other countries and find the UK seriously wanting.

If you look into the history of the first electricity supplies in the UK, many rural villages had electricity, generated within the community, long before the major towns and cities had moved beyond gas jets. Usually courtesy of a village group or individual who decided that generating electricity for the community from that ubiquitous natural resource (water) would be a great thing to do, so they got on and JFDI. Both the village I was brought up in (mentioned in the link above) and the one I now live in were ahead of Manchester and Teeside in providing their own electricity to local people.

The impact that this had on many communities was astounding, and although the village I now live in could only provide one lightbulb to each house in the village at first in the late 1910/early 1920s, you can imagine how that began to change rural life. The problems for these communities came when electricity was nationalised in the 50s, ditto with water supplies that were also nationalised. We should learn from that. Local is better than national.

If only we could make broadband from water....and weren't reliant on self-serving corporates to get the essential ingredient. Even so, those responsible for holding up the provision of broadband to communities need to change their thinking and look at the parallels from a mere century ago. Electricity enabled untold innovations, changes to people's lives, improvements in health (no more sewing by candlelight etc), and led to the huge assortment of devices we have today that rely on electricity and apparently make life simpler.

The innovation and benefits didn't come from the electricity companies, they came from the consumers of the utility and exactly the same happens with broadband. People need to have enough to do whatever they choose to, and the sooner we get that and start making it feasible, the faster this country will recover.

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