How do "smart" meters phone home?

It will depend on the meter in question - there are many possibilities such as GPRS (mobile) modems, connection to Ethernet or Wifi in the house, power-line modems, etc.

Some use a mesh network among peers in the neighborhood. Often there is a "base unit" somewhere in the neighborhood to connect the mesh to the Internet, somehow. Others don't "call home" at all, rather dump the data to a truck that comes around once a month. Ask your utility.

Some information about the local system around here. The electricity meters use PLC communications through the wires to the closest transformer. From there on, typically fiber or 3G/UMTS/GPRS modems.

The smart water meters use RF or wires to a concentrator, which then communicates by DSL or cellular line with the backend system.

The remote district heating system uses GPRS modem that is connected with the meter.

Many of them use 256K bit/sec 802.15.4. We can see around 10 to 20 electrical meters in the neighborhood, but they are encrypted. So, range is around 50km to 100km.

Yes, anyone can.

It's not slow. For example, the basic data rate for the 900 MHz systems is about 1Mbit/sec.

Locally (Santa Cruz, CA) PG&E uses electric power meters by Landis+Gyr and Silver Springs Networks:

The electric meters operate on 900 Mhz FHSS (frequency hopping spread spectrum) to form a store-n-forward type mesh network. The mesh eventually terminates in a pole top radio that connects to some kind of backhaul (wired, wireless, fiber, etc) to where the data is collected.

The smart meters also contain an 802.15.4 (Zigbee) radio that is currently disabled. Eventually, it will be used to communicate with various home devices and appliances to provide monitoring and possibly shut down high consumption appliances during peak usage periods.

The PG&E natural gas meters are by some vendor who's name escapes my at the moment. They operate on about 460 MHz using NBFM modulation and also form a mesh network.

Both meters are powered by Tadiran 10 year life Lithium batteries, which are NOT rechargeable. Since all of these meters were installed in a fairly short time, there is going to be an interesting fire drill to get the batteries replaced in about 5 years.

Something like these monitors:

No brain. All I had to do is walk outside and look at the meter.

when kids with a laptop, a Zigbee radio, and a "shut down your neighbors for the lulz!" app drive down the street.

I *hope* that some politician with electric baseboard heat and a faulty thermostat will be the first person to get the SWAT raid looking for a grow op, but I *know* better than that.

Matt Roberds