I got Smart Metered Today

Your cable is out 3.65 days a year? I can't believe that.

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Well it was done like you said 40 + years ago and likely much earlier. Wikipedia shows that was done for most of a century. Most everyone has converted to 240 V or 480 V normal circuits. I was an inspector for such a conversion project about 15 years ago. It was supposed to be the last one in the Lost Angeles area. There is probably some still out there in the rural areas of California. The antifuse was in how the ballast operated, it was fed from a series to multiple transformer.

?-)

Random failure, or storm damage?

It has been out two days so far this calendar year.

-- Les Cargill

And out here, it might go out for a few minutes or a few hours a couple times a year. Maybe one tenth of one percent.

And the Internet feed rarely ever goes out.

So it must have been a head end.

Interesting statement... I wonder whether they'd be more reliable if they were paid more...

I don't mean they were bad people - it's just that meters are in funny places, there are dogs, that sort of thing.

-- Les Cargill

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?-)

I think the PLC (power line communication) is invented by the Soviet Union...

Wiki doesn't say that, but given the obvious advantages for bugs, I wouldn't be at all surprised. They invented bouncing laser beams off embassy windows to pick up conversations inside.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Good point - one I'd overlooked. Lots of strange situations when you're going onto peoples' property...

That's irrelevant, though. No data is lost because of that "outage". This isn't a telephone network rather more of a data network. BTW, this is one area where a RF system would be better (not that it really matters).

Thay also invented Jack Daniels.

Probably the CIA was doing similar stuff. Hey, the Chinese were naive enough to have a presidential 767 outfitted by a Texas company a few years ago and they discovered dozens of highly sophisticated bugs were installed at no extra cost. Maybe they didn't find them all!

survive but

So many gas stations had a satellite link for their credit card processing -- marked by a rectanguloid satellite dish with a seemingly low tilt angle. But that likely went out twice a year from the solar transit, assuming nothing catastrophic happened to the satellite.

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Dunno if others did that as well, but Amoco certainly did.

-- Les Cargill

When the city does it, more than likely it's a public safety MESH and they aren't apt to share that.

In the U.S. it's going to be BPL and I can tell you there'll be enough ticked off amateur operators that it'll do stuttering wonders for any data signal.

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...and your point? The Internet service *will* be public. The mesh has no reason to be public but it carries both water and electric usage data.