Add increased home thefts as another potential side-effect of utilities’ efforts to deploy electricity meters with embedded Wi-Fi. We’ve already noted how these meters have a strong tendency to interfere with home routers and WISP equipment, but now concerns are being raised that they’re too easy to hack, allowing people to easily determine when residents haven’t been at home. Security researchers tell New Scientist that they were able to hack into most common Wi-Fi embedded [...]

Chattanooga, Tennessee’s power-utility-turned-FTTH-provider see (our user reviews) a few days ago shook up their speeds, potentially in anticipation of Comcast bringing their own improved cable speeds (and Metro Ethernet To The Home…more on that in a later article) to the market. The upgrade, which roughly coincides with Hackanooga, a hackathon centered on finding uses for gigabit FTTH speeds, is the second in EPB’s history and puts EPB’s speed-price ratio somewhere between Google Fiber and everyone [...]

As we’ve noted repeatedly, ISPs are so hungry to cash in on caps and overages, they’re rushing toward implementing meters without making sure they work. Canadian cable operator Cogeco has been the absolute worst on this front, implementing metered usage charges back in 2009 — and three years later still unable to measure usage correctly. Users continue to argue that Cogeco’s meter is inaccurate when users can load it at all, and every so often [...]

A ranking of the fifteen least popular companies in the United States continues to be dominated by cable operators. The data, culled from the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, places Charter third, Comcast fourth, Time Warner Cable sixth and Cox seventh. Despite some strides in some of these areas, most of the complaints continue to focus on poor customer service, high prices, missed appointments and inept billing practices. Not to be outdone by their cable counterparts, [...]

Over the years several communities have gotten upset about the AT&T VRAD cabinets required to deliver the company’s U-Verse FTTN/VDSL service. In some areas, complaints involved anger of AT&T ignoring easement rights or childhood traffic dangers, while in other markets the complaints have been aesthetic or property-value driven. In Illinois, groups like Stop The Box fought to have a say in VRAD placement, with AT&T finally going so far as to agree to pay $1,500-$2000 [...]

LONDON — The market for smart appliances hasn’t taken off as quickly as many observers expected. Many of these products, which take advantage of broadband communications to operate intelligently and save energy, are still used only in small pilot projects. However, according to a report by ABI Research, shipments will soon begin to pick up and will exceed 24 million units by 2017. With smart meter deployment growing, energy costs rising, and progress made on [...]

The Department of Energy, in collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, has released a draft of the Electricity Sector Cybersecurity Risk Management Process (RMP) Guideline for public comment. The RMP Guideline was drafted by a joint public-private sector team that also included representatives from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Department of Homeland Security, and utilities. The initiative to develop the RMP Guideline is led [...]

State Commissions appear to be accepting a standard approach to customer data access and privacy. The recent Colorado Public Utilities Commission decision on data privacy follows the earlier California Public Utilities Commission decision, in that they both agree that utilities have a right to collect and use customer data to provide regulated utility services. However, a distinction is being made between the data that the utility and utility affiliates need for forecasting and billing services [...]

The Colorado Public Utilities Commission has issued a list of recommended smart grid data privacy rules that subject utilities to a whole range of requirements, and penalties up to $2000 per violation. The document also gives utilities up to 20 days to file their objections, and if no exceptions are received, the rules will become law. The rules would require utilities to explain their data collection processes, the frequency of data collection and the security [...]

There is “no silver bullet to address the communication needs of utilities,” and utilities need to “use all tools in the toolkit,” noted David Masters, Manager, Technology Development at Duke Energy. Masters spoke on Wednesday’s highly attended UTC webinar that looked into the challenges of utility communications network modernization. He discussed how Duke confronted the task of integrating millions of discrete points and devices that are part of its envisioned digital grid architecture. Commercial service [...]