Within the more general subject of smart grid, media coverage is centring on smart meters and the impact they will have on the consumer.  That’s resulting in some aggressive battles between competing standards groups, a growing level of negative publicity for utilities that are being portrayed as greedy ogres trying to get more money out of the consumer, and the appearance of ever more flamboyant futurologists who believe that the utilities will control all of the appliances in our homes.

That level of noise has the effect of making smart meters look as if they are the lynchpin of the smart grid.  Hence every utility is rushing to deploy them, backed by willing legislators showering them with stimulus funds.   It’s not difficult to see why we’re in this topsy-turvy state.  Underlying improvements to the grid don’t have a direct impact on consumers, or only do when the lack of them means that the consumer’s power disappears.  Which makes it boring.  In contrast, home automation offers the science fiction vision of devices that turn themselves on or off to minimise our energy bills and save the world.  But does it help the industry?

I’d like to hope that’s not the real reason that governments around the world are legislating and pouring money into smart grid evolution.   For utilities, the real job ahead is slightly different depending on where you look.  In the US, it’s about the need to understand far more about the state of every mile of the grid in order to upgrade it to maintain service.  Within Europe there’s less focus on the grid itself, as there’s a greater degree of confidence (or smugness) about its resilience.  Instead there’s concern is about the potential shortfall in generating capacity and how the utilities will manage to balance demand.

That difference in perspective across the Atlantic has resulted in some interesting differences in the approach to smart metering.  Certain countries have had AMR for years - Italy is a prime example, where its first generation roll-out was justified by the astronomical levels of customer fraud.  They’re just starting their second generation of “smart” meters and the general consensus it that they’ll be onto their third by 2015.  All three of which will be mutually incompatible.  That is not a sustainable business model.

The question of business model for smart meters is an interesting one, as it goes to the heart of who pays for the meters.  That’s something that has just become even more important, as Maryland has turned down Baltimore Gas & Electric’s request to get customers to fund their meter deployment through a retrospective surcharge.  What is difficult is to work out is exactly what the business model is?

Number one business model is that by providing customers with more information, it reduces their energy bill.  But that means a utility pays money to reduce its revenue.  So that doesn’t work.

Ah, says the industry, energy prices are going to rise, so it will help stop your bill growing.  It’s the old “jam tomorrow” argument, which has a bit more logic to it.  However, prices need to rise a lot to make consumers change their behaviour en masse.  When it costs ten times as much to do the laundry, users will do it.  When it adds 20 cents to a wash, it’s not going to happen.  So the question moves to being how quickly Governments will allow that level of price hike.  And the answer is probably not in the timescales in which they want smart meters deployed.  It would be too much of a vote loser to allow that.

Then there’s the populist vision of selling the convenience of automating the home.  That one’s been around since the 1950s and is still struggling.  It’s a geek play and will probably remain so.  It might be possible to sell the cost of smart meters to this demographic, but it’s barely a scratch on the surface of smart metering.

Once these have been dismissed, the business models turn towards improving efficiency of the utilities’ billing cycle.  These range from improving the ability to send accurate bills instead of estimates (and look what that did for PG&E), through to making it easier to send a consumer their final bill when they move house.  How any of these fund the cost of deploying and servicing a smart meter eludes me.

I don’t think I’m alone in this scepticism, as I see a significant number of utilities asking “What can a smart meter do for me”, particularly within Europe.  That’s in contrast to the more common question being asked in the US of “what can a smart meter do for the customer?”  The difference is probably a result of the lower level of media interest in smart metering within Europe, where there’s less discussion of the possible customer “benefits” of smart metering.

The problem with a high media and (by association) investor interest in smart metering is that it rapidly dominates the thinking of what smart grid is all about.  You can take the view that it’s no bad thing if it generates more attention, as underlying funding will grow for all parts of the picture.  However, if it sets unattainable expectations for consumers, deepening the subsequent “trough of despair”, which will then have a knock on effect across the whole industry.  So to some degree, the fortunes of the smart grid are being held hostage to the behaviour of the smart metering sector.  It’s a case of the tail wagging the dog.

Unfortunately, in concentrating on the gee-whizz aspect of meter applications, we may be losing sight of some of the more interesting things that smart meters can do for the grid.  Instead of the current fad of concentrating on an iPad (or should we call it an iHoD?) on every living room wall to help consumers reduce their utility bills, (and where is the business model in that?), smart meter deployments could be telling the grid useful things like outage information.  Of course, for that to work they need a gateway that works when the power fails.  I’m sure that someone is manufacturing and shipping meters or gateways that can do that, but I’ve yet to see one deployed that actually has a battery in it, as opposed to an empty battery compartment. 

Instead the smart meter industry appears fixated on consumer technology trends, with their associated short term attention spans.  Today it’s ZigBee smart energy (would that be version 1.0 or version 2.0, sir?).  Tomorrow it will be Bluetooth, so you can control it from your smartphone and the month after that we’ll have Dash7 connecting it directly to your local military nuclear reactor.  Which is enough to make any consumer want to forget energy conservation and turn up the air conditioning.

Incidentally, there was a refreshing blast of sanity in the recent Public Service Commission of Maryland’s Order 83410 turning down Baltimore Gas & Electricity’s proposal to fund a deployment of smart meters by adding a customer surcharge.   Their adjudication included the observation that “If it turns out that appliance manufacturers decide to adopt some alternative to ZigBee technology, the expectation that the proposed “smart meters” will one day be capable of communicating with a customer’s “smart” appliances evaporates.  BGE ratepayers will then be stuck paying higher rates for a white elephant, while customers of utilities that prudently waited to allow the industry to mature will enjoy the benefits of a wiser and safer “smart grid” deployment.”

I doubt that the ZigBee Alliance will appreciate being categorised as a potential white elephant, but it’s a true statement, regardless of which of the current wireless standards are chosen.  We’re currently several years away from deciding what the industry will choose.  Making a decision now is perilous.  The approach of groups like UMI - the Universal Metering Interface and the U-SNAP Alliance, which both build in upgradability to different standards, look as if they deserve rather more attention from the industry than they are getting.

Utilities and grid sections of the industry need to start to think far more clearly about how a smart meter can complement and enhance the performance of the grid.  Rather than adding more customer centric “features”, it’s important that the meters and gateways can tell the grid how it’s working.  At the end of the day customers want a reliable grid first and foremost.  Shouldn’t we be specifying meters to achieve that, making them a true component of the smart grid, rather than turning them into another techie toy?

We need to step back from some of the more outlandish ideas and make sure we understand the basics.  That may mean a delay in deployments.  It may mean a generation of consultants will have a slightly more frugal retirement.  But, with luck, it may also mean the industry only has to do the job once.

To be fair, ZigBee’s not the first to trademark the term.  Delaware Capital Formation are in on the act as well, but only with respect to machines, pumps and compressors.  So are Jetmax International, but they want it for solar powered lights and accumulators.  They also own it for hobby craft and educational kits.  Smartenergy Ltd of Illinois, (who, from their name would appear to have a stronger claim, and are courteous enough to elide the space between the words), own the use for heating and energy management devices and have done since 2005.  But TMI in Texas got there first, registering it for residential construction services the year before.

The utilities have been busy too, with the Northwest Natural Gas Company registering “Smart Energy” for gas utility services.  Dropping the space, SmartPak Equine use it for feed supplements for horses, which may or may not generate some more gas.

ZigBee claim that the first time the phrase “Smart Energy” was used in conjunction with wireless was the 22^nd January 2008.  That would probably surprise the Smart Energy Alliance, which was formed by Capgemini, Cisco, GE Energy, HP, Intel and Oracle back in 2006.  Of course, they’re all industry minnows, compared to the ZigBee Alliance, so it’s not surprising they never noticed its existence.

The cynical may look at this and think that ZigBee is staring into its crystal ball and foreseeing a future where the smart energy industry picks a different short range wireless standard.  Owning the trademark is then a cunning ploy that allows them to sue whoever else wins, preserving their legal department, even if their members don’t sell any chips.

ZigBee didn’t just stop at trade-marking Smart Energy.  It went and trade-marked “Smart Energy Profile” as well.  Sadly, that one has already passed its sell-by date, as ZigBee has moved to Smart Energy Profile 2.0.  Which they haven’t trade-marked!  So if anyone from Z-Wave, Wireless-MBUS, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth wants to jump on the bandwagon and spoil ZigBee’s game, they ought to rush out and trademark it now.

The question is, where will they stop?  Will they trade-mark “health care”, “remote control”, home automation” or “telecom services”?  They haven’t yet, but I bet they’re thinking about it. 

So prepare to be scared.  If someone knocks on your door and asks for your name, don’t tell them.  Don’t tell them your spouse’s name, your children’s, or even your pet’s.  If you’re lucky it will just be a Jehovah’s Witness.  If you’re not, it might be a ZigBee trademark lawyer, on his mission to own you and the world.

It’s a bit like the case of a child who has hitherto only been allowed chocolate on Christmas Day.  Now they’re being led into a chocolate factory and told they can eat as much as they want.  The inevitable result is a very happy child for a few hours, until they’re violently sick.  At which point they either vow never to eat another chocolate, or learn to treat it in a more sensible manner.

Today the medical industry and energy utilities are being shown the doors of the chocolate factory.  We have yet to see how they behave once they enter it.  Some may emerge as triumphant Charlies, but others risk becoming the commercial equivalent of Augustus Gloop and Veruca Salt.

The first point to address in this new world of data overload is the assumption that we’ll be able to do lots of useful things once we have this data.  There are lots of companies painting a picture of automated homes and lifestyle medical devices based on analysing this tsunami of data, but as yet we don’t know how much can be inferred from it, let alone how we will be able to use it to control other devices.  The assumption that having over a million times the volume of data every year (one reading every three seconds instead of one per year) is going to tell us anything useful is still exactly that - an assumption.  The nightmare scenario is that it doesn’t - it’s just random noise.

I fervently hope that’s not the case and that the data is useful, but to confirm that needs a lot more work.  mHealth and smart energy aren’t the only markets facing this problem - the U.S. military acknowledged it recently, when they said “we’re going to find ourselves swimming in sensors and drowning in data.” We are moving from drawing a straight line through two points to drawing one through a million of them.   At the most basic level, it involves a fundamental change in the underlying business model.  Both the medical profession and the energy utilities currently work on the assumption that if they hear nothing from us, they can ignore us for the next year.  Now they’ll be hearing from us every few seconds.  It’s not just the volume of data that is available, but the question of how to react to it.  That new granularity will show deviations from the straight line, whether it’s raised blood pressure or turning on the hosepipe to water the petunias.  What should a supplier do about it?

In the past, the safe route has been to ignore everything, not least because you don’t known about it, and it will probably have gone away by the time of the next data point.  Once you let the cat out of the bag and tell the consumer that you are monitoring their every move or cup of tea, then they will expect more feedback.  That means more resources on the part of the provider, which is likely to mean more cost.  Where’s the business model that supports that?

It suggests that the industry needs to step back from some of the more complex technology and fanciful gadget push that is appearing in the market and instead concentrate on answering the basic question.  Which is “what can I usefully do with the data”?  That means working with simple sensors that can collect the data, and back end systems that can then aggregate and mine it.  When the UK’s Technology Strategy Board was collecting input for their Assisted Living Innovation Program, I argued that they should do exactly that - deploy ten thousand or more sensors of whatever variety and concentrate on collecting and analysing the data.   I’m pleased to say that they’ve embraced that approach.

It is a critically important task for anyone who is moving into M2M (and that is essentially what mHealth and smart metering are).  You need to start by understanding your data.  Only when you have done that can you start to decide what value it has and whether a large scale deployment is justified.  That justification might be because it makes your business more efficient, it might be because you can offer additional services to your customer, or gain a competitive advantage, possibly by disrupting the market.  Or it could be because a government pays you to do it; but if they do, will they continue to pay the long term, day-to-day operating cost or working that data?

The problem is that you’re unlikely to know the answer to these questions until a year or more after you’ve deployed your first ten thousand devices and collected and analysed that year’s worth of data.  That’s a large initial expense with no immediate return. 

If the resulting business model is customer oriented, rather than profiting from internal business efficiencies, then it needs to include some compelling feedback if the user is going to want to continue to use it.   That in itself is a new area for both the medical and energy industries.  Neither use a language which the consumer understands, at least until the day the bill arrives.  Instead they stick to scientific jargon with BTUs, kWhrs, systolic and diastolic pressures. 

Consumers are far more interested in comparisons - for them these provide the compelling feedback.  That means simple comparisons such as “are we spending more than we were?”, “more than our neighbours are?”, “are we getting better?”, “should I have eaten that extra doughnut?” need to be developed.  None of these are the type of information that these industries have experience with, but if they are going to provide a compelling service they need to take into account customer psychology.  Even when that is done it may not have the desired effect, as evidenced by the recent report which found that when told they are using less energy than their neighbours, Republicans tend to compensate by increasing their energy usage.

To add another level of complexity, many of these comparisons raise privacy issues that are new to these industries.  Comparisons are normally more persuasive when they’re made with a group of peers, rather than just comparing past performance.  But how many companies are aware of what they are allowed to do in comparing an individual against data from other customers?  How much granularity can you use in comparisons with a neighbour?

Some companies are trying to leapfrog the data learning stage by selling a vision to customers.  A good example is Fitbit, who are using thir initial customers both to build their database and provide feedback.  However, for established businesses, which are those that will be supplying 99% of energy and healthcare users, that’s probably not an option.

Equally difficult is answering the question of how often feedback should be provided?  Should it be realtime - “turn it off now”, or after the event?  Should it affect when you are doing something, i.e. trying to change behaviour now, or retrospectively?  Even before we get to schemes such as energy shedding, which will turn off appliances, we need to know much more about the usage models behind data before bringing further automation into the picture.

These are difficult questions, both for new and established industries.  However, the fundamental order remains unchanged.  First you need to acquire the data.  Then you need to understand what it means.  Only then can you determine what that implies for your business model.  Keep an open mind and be flexible in building those business models.  Whether they be improved efficiency, customer retention, Government mandate, future sales through behavioural modification or company acquisition, they all need a company to take the time to understand the data and develop a consistent model.  Otherwise, you may look back and wish that you’d kept chocolate as a once a year treat, and never entered the chocolate factory.

The gulf between the enthusiasts and realists is wide.  It is worrying that much of the industry is rushing blindly towards deployment, with little understanding of the risks and what can be done to mitigate them. 

One of key mantras I keep on hearing repeated when security of the smart meter is raised is “why would anyone bother to hack it?”  Josh Wright, talking about ZigBee security at QuahogCon hit the nail on the head when he answered that.  “As an attacker, ZigBee lets me interact with the real world - that’s exciting.  I can interact with a dam, or natural gas distribution lines.  We’re looking at a wireless protocol that lets us interact with real things in the real world - it’s not just credit cards.”  The industry forgets the excitement that comes from “because I can” and “real things”  And it only needs a few people doing that to fuel scare stories that will kill the whole industry.

Let’s start with Josh.  He’s been looking at ZigBee security for some time and reporting on the issues, both of the standard and also of implementations.  Like many other wireless standards, ZigBee started off with fairly basic security.  Over the years they have added more and better ways of implementing security.  However, although these exist within the specification they’re not generally mandated and most ZigBee products on the market don’t implement all of them.  Even where they do, there may be errors in the protocol stacks which allow hacking attacks to succeed.

ZigBee’s not alone in this - every wireless standard has gone through the same process.  However, the issues only come to light once a standard starts to gain market traction and ship products in volume.  Hackers generally don’t bother with obscure or academic standards - they concentrate on the big shippers.  Up until now, ZigBee has not been widely used and has escaped scrutiny.  With its move into the big time, it’s starting to attract that attention.  And that attention is showing that a lot of what is in the market is seriously deficient.

You can see Josh’s presentation and also listen to it.  If you are working in the smart energy industry, I’d urge you to find 45 minutes to listen.  It is both entertaining and informative.  And scary.  Robert Cragie has posted some pertinent points about this presentation on his Gridmerge blog.

Last month the ZigBee Alliance asked for comments on its Smart Energy Profile 2.0.  It’s part of a new “open” process.  I hope that openness will involve publishing all of the comments, so that the industry as a whole can help scrutinise and drive the specification forward.  If you missed the deadline, you still have the opportunity to post comments on the draft specification itself, although that round closes on June 4^th.  If you do submit comments on any security issues, I would urge you to make them public as well, to get wider scrutiny.

ZigBee is by no means alone in this debate.  None of the low power wireless contenders vying for this space have had any real degree of external analysis.  That’s equally valid for Z-Wave, Wireless M-Bus and Bluetooth low energy.  All have written credible specifications, but none have been independently tested.  ZigBee is doing the right thing by being open about it, and the others need to follow that example.

Which brings me to the single chip.  If that seems an odd jump, it’s not, because the single chip suppliers are selling a dangerous belief, which is that you can make your meter cheaply now, taking advantage of the high levels of integration that are possible, and then upgrade it later.  The “jam tomorrow” story of upgradability is a very dangerous sticking plaster that is starting to be used to cover up any worries about security. 

Single chips will almost certainly be the way forward.  It’s the natural evolutionary path for electronics.  But it’s one that is normally taken after a standard settles down, particularly if portions of the standard go into ROM.  Because it’s driven by cost reduction, it normally means that the resources on the chip are limited to what is needed today, because unnecessary resource costs money.  As a guarantee against future problems, it’s a promise that doesn’t work.

The best specification for a smart meter that I’ve seen is the British Gas one.  It mandates upgradeability.  It also mandates a recovery procedure from a failed update, which is excellent and more far-sighted than most.  And it specifies a product lifetime of twenty years.   That’s nothing new for the metering industry.  But it represents multiple lifetimes for the wireless industry.  And that discrepancy is where we have the problem.

It’s informative to have a brief history lesson in order to understand what twenty years means.  If we look back to May 1990, the more advanced of us were running Windows 2.0, although many were still using DOS, or even GEM.   I’d recently bought a 286 based PC with a 20MB drive, thinking that would be all I ever needed.  No piece of software I buy today would run on that PC. 

Digital Mobile telephony was still a dream.  No mobile phone from 1990 would work today.  Five years later I was lucky enough to own a recently launched Nokia 2010, which still works on the GSM networks.  But unless you lived in Europe and were at the bleeding edge of GSM technology, then any phone you might have kept from 1995 is unlikely to work anywhere in the world today. 

In terms of short range wireless, everything was still a dream.  In 1995, Wi-Fi was seven years away.  It’s pre-cursor - 802.11 would arrive the following year, but operating a different frequency, so any PCMICA cards you might have bought then would not work with anything you could buy today.  And ZigBee, Bluetooth and 802.15.4 were nowhere on the horizon.

Go back just ten years and there’s not a lot of difference.  Most PCs were running Windows 95 or 98 and the first Bluetooth devices were on the market.  If you had one of those, it would still probably work with a current Bluetooth product, but at a base level of interoperability.  The original security features would still be working, but the more recent enhancements would not.  The first Wi-Fi / 802.11b products were beginning to emerge, but with security limited to WEP.  They would probably connect with current Wi-Fi products, but it would not be possible to upgrade them to work with the higher security of WPA, which is deemed essential today.  And ZigBee was still nowhere to be seen.

We need to regress a mere five years to 2005 to find the first ZigBee release and products.  They would be largely incompatible with today’s ZigBee PRO products and could not be upgraded to the security requirements of either of the Smart Energy Profiles.

Bluetooth and GSM have fared best in terms of long term compatibility and security.  Whether that is down to luck or judgement can be debated, but that’s not the point.  We forget just how quickly technology moves, and how, as it becomes endemic, hackers find flaws either in the standard or the implementations. 

The bottom line is that none of these early products can be upgraded to include what is considered best practice even five years later, let alone ten, fifteen or twenty.  And there’s the rub.  Upgradeability might allow a small improvement to security, but any major flaw is likely to require more resources than a highly optimised single chip contains. 

This is a fundamental factor of the rapid progress of technology and the smart meter business needs to understand it.  For the future of the industry we need to ensure that the security is as well tested as possible before we start deployments.  There are a lot of companies that want to ship in order to make money today, but that puts the entire industry at risk.

The other concern is that wireless upgrades are difficult.  I’ve been working in wireless for many years and my advice to customers is never to upgrade a product in the field.  With each upgrade a percentage of products will probably fail and that percentage will grow with each new upgrade.  Upgrading is not a panacea for cutting corners in the original design; it’s an open cheque-book for future support costs when the upgrade inevitably falls over.  It’s a subject that is glossed over, but sufficiently important that I’ve devoted half a chapter to it in my forthcoming book - The essentials of short range wireless.

We must not forget that throughout the history of metering, people have convinced themselves that there are ways of fiddling meters to falsify the readings, from rewiring them, adding magnets, inserting photographic film to act as a brake, using vacuum cleaners (gas meters) or magic devices that alter the spikes in your supply.  Once we add digital electronics and a wireless link, this band of amateur hackers will grow from a trickle to a flood as every engineering student tries to find a way of reducing their bill, or turning off their lecture hall lights.

There is no perfect solution - it will become a cat and mouse game, but we need to start from a position of strength.  Rushing to market is more likely to be a deployment of weakness, from which it will be difficult to recover.

The first is the fact that British Gas understands data.  Back in 1995 they were the first corporation in the world to roll out GSM data connectivity to all of their service engineers.  They’ve kept on quietly pushing the leading edge of technology ever since.

The second is that they are a major player in a market that has been deregulated for many years.  They know that they need to persuade customers to stay with them and that those customers have a choice.

Both are skills that are markedly lacking in many of the other trials we have had around the world.  If anyone can prove that smart metering will work it’s probably going to be British Gas.  In a week where an Associated Press report poured scorn on the security of smart meters, and shortly after the PG&E billing fiasco, the industry needs some good, solid evidence of where smart metering really is.  Compared to this deployment, everything else may look like rank amateurism.  This will be the one to watch.

Today we take mobile data for granted.  In 1995 it was a novelty.  The GSM networks in Europe were just upgrading their networks from data rates of 2.4kbps to 9.6kbps, and if you wanted to use this you needed a PCMCIA data card to run the top end of the GSM data stack, with a lead connecting it to the mobile phone.  At the time, British Gas had the largest network of service engineers looking after customer’s boilers (furnaces) and had identified a number of problems with the way their service organisation worked.

There were two main issues.  As boilers became more complex, engineers could increasingly expect to turn up at a house to confront a boiler they’d not seen before.  Even where it was one they knew, in many cases they didn’t carry a spare part with them.  So they’d leave the householder with no heating and a promise that they’d phone back to make another appointment when they found out if there was a spare in stock.  It wasn’t a great user experience.

To solve it, British Gas took the radical step of supplying each service engineer with a rugged laptop with a GSM data connection.  The laptop had an expert system to help diagnose faults and data on all of the current boilers.  If they encountered a new one, they could check to see if data was available online, or use the mobile phone to call back to base.  (Incidentally, the concept of giving an engineer a mobile phone was pretty radical itself back in 1995).  Once they’d indentified the fault, they could check for spare parts online and book the next appointment with the customer before they left.  The customer satisfaction improved enormously.  The resulting deployment of just over 5,000 devices remained the largest single GSM data solution for most of that decade.

I recount the story as I designed the PCMCIA data card for this project.  At the time all of those involved in it considered what British Gas was doing to be the wild west frontier of GSM data technology, as it did things that no-one had done before for a commercial application.  It worked because of the level of detail that British gas put into the project to make it work.  Where problems arose, they dug down into the fine detail, even if that meant looking at component level issues within devices.

That’s what makes me so interested in this project.  British Gas has taken the brave step of publishing the full specifications for this deployment on their website.  They’re as detailed as anything I have seen and well worth reading.   It’s well thought through and not just jumping onto the latest technology bandwagon.  They’ve chosen to use ZigBee with the Smart Energy profile, although they don’t specify whether it’s v1.0 or v2.0.  More than anyone else, I expect them to put it through its paces and see how it stands up to volume deployment.  They also understand security and should be able to say whether that within their ZigBee implementation stands up to scrutiny, or whether something else is needed. That’s already recognised within their spec.  If my experience with GSM is anything to go by, it will be the first real test it gets and the industry needs to keep a close eye on it.

I also have confidence that they will do a much better job of billing than PG&E.  For many years, gas and electricity supply has been deregulated within the UK and utilities have had to learn how to win customers.  The various players have learnt a lot of lessons, not least because they’ve made some pretty horrendous mistakes over the years.  In 2003, British Gas was voted the worst company in the UK for dealing with customer’s complaints.  But they’ve learnt and had time to improve.  Perhaps not everything, but hopefully enough to avoid the basic mistakes that others have made.

I don’t expect it to be perfect.  But if the thoroughness of the specs can be replicated in the deployment, this promises to be the smart energy roll-out that tells us whether the promises of interoperability and timescale we keep being promised are real, or whether smart energy is just an opportunistic, grant grabbing industry that concentrating on nothing more than PR.

Within the major working groups, things weren’t quite so clear.  NIST, which has been trying to herd the wireless cats into some semblance of order started a more thorough analysis of just what existed, which saw an increased emphasis on other members of the IEEE 802 standards family, bolstering the fortunes of Wi-Fi (in its 802.11 incarnation) and Bluetooth (in its 802.15.1-2005 form).  And it made its preferences clear about a need for IP support.  But the status quo didn’t seem to shift very much as a result.

Then, last month, Bluetooth emerged from its normal mode of PR silence to announce the formation of a Smart Energy Study Group.  The fact that Emerson, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of home HVAC devices was one of the sponsors for the group caused some noticeable shivers in the Smart Energy marketplace.

This week, there were more ripples, when Wi-Fi and ZigBee announced their Alliance of Alliances to jointly provide an in-home solution for Smart Energy.  The Twitterati thought it significant, but what was behind it?  Is it deadly rivals joining forces against a common enemy, or is there more going on? 

On the surface it’s a bizarre alliance, as much has been written about the interference issues of using both ZigBee and Wi-Fi in close proximity to each other.  Some of that has been promoted by rival standards, but as both are fixed channel devices in the 2.4GHz spectrum with limited agility, it is a real issue. 

Despite its high PR visibility and initial success, ZigBee has been having to trim its cloth to accommodate some of the industry’s requirements.   NIST’s Smart Grid Interoperability Project (SGIP) has indicated its preference for an IP based protocol for Smart Energy devices.  ZigBee’s first version of Smart Energy profile didn’t support that, which left them in a quandary.  So they scurried away to some of their former members who had deserted them in favour of 6LowPAN to attempt to bring the work they’d been doing on that back into the ZigBee fold.  They still have a vision of releasing a future version of their Smart Energy Profile as an IEC specification, but quite what that will be is becoming more opaque by the day.  To get there, they’re reportedly looking for input from IEC members to continue to evolve the profile.

Wi-Fi doesn’t have any problems with support for IP protocols, as that’s what it’s made of.  Where it has had a problem with Smart Energy devices is in its power consumption.  Wi-Fi is not a lightweight wireless protocol - the way it works and the volume of data that goes over the air, even for a small piece of information, means that it’s power hungry.  Or at least, it has been.  In recent years a number of new silicon vendors have emerged producing some innovative Wi-Fi (or to be more correct 802.11) chipsets that substantially reduce the power, to the point that they can be used for small battery powered devices.  Foremost amongst these are G2 Microsystems, Gainspan, Redpine Signals and Ozmo Devices.  Most of these vendors already target the Smart Energy market and must have felt as sick as a parrot when they heard that the Wi-Fi Alliance was having a public affair with their arch-rival.

The cynical may say it doesn’t matter, at least for Wi-Fi.  Its volume shipments are so much larger than ZigBee’s (over two orders of magnitude larger), that it can use the announcement as political leverage to improve their position and then dispose of their new-found child bride as soon as the market takes off.

The announcement does raise the question of where Wi-Fi Direct has disappeared to?  Touted as a low power PAN solution for Wi-Fi, some of these vendors have been instrumental in driving it forward.  It seems strange that the Wi-Fi Alliance saw an alliance with ZigBee as a better alternative to promoting their own low power solution.

Which adds credence to the theory that this was a knee jerk reaction about the arrival of Bluetooth on the Smart Energy scene.  Bluetooth has been used in Smart Energy devices for many years, but most have been built using proprietary protocols.  (That’s actually been a deliberate choice from many appliance vendors, who in the past have not wanted interoperability, as they prefer to owner the entire ecosystem.)  The announcement that Bluetooth was working on an interoperable Smart Energy profile, alongside the release of Bluetooth low energy, which is even lower power than ZigBee, seems to have induced a mild panic, where a known enemy seems a lot safer than an unknown one.

However, all of these announcements detract from the real question, which is “what is required for local connectivity in Smart Energy?”  Rather than pandering to the rival screams of “I do it best”, the Smart Energy industry needs to come together with a requirement of what it actually needs.  Is it IP to a device, or just to a home gateway?  What level of security is needed?  What range?  What battery life?  What robustness to interference is required, and for how many years must it maintain that robustness?

Hopefully the SGIP group may answer these and other important questions, so it can direct the industry to develop a standard that is fit for purpose.   It is clear that industry leaders like Emerson consider it far too early to put all of their eggs into one basket.   So we should probably take announcements like the Wi-Fi / ZigBee alliance with a pinch of salt, as being just one more distraction on the bumpy road to a reliable, interoperable solution.

What we can predict is that as soon as Smart Meters are deployed, the first impulse of every neighbourhood hacker will be to take control of their school or local government’s heating and air conditioning, just to prove they can.  At one level, that’s a local annoyance.  If it affects our utility bills it becomes more than an annoyance.  And if it were co-ordinated by someone with a more malicious intent, then turning everything on at a peak time would take the grid down.   So it’s important that we make sure it is as secure as possible.

That makes the two pieces of news this week a lot more important than just providing the excuse for a good headline.  The first announcement was that the Information Trust Institute at the University of Illinois has been granted $18.8 million for a five year research project on securing the Smart Grid.  The second piece of good news is the release of a set of ZigBee hacking tools by Joshua Wright at ToorCon11.  These will let developers discover what vulnerabilities exist within the ZigBee standard, which is vitally important if it wants to be selected for use in Smart Meters.  Josh describes his work as “will hack for SUSHI“.  As far as I know he’s not received any sushi for his efforts, let alone an $18.8 million grant.  If the Government is serious about the security of the energy supply, they should consider diverting some of that funding in his direction. 

So why should we be worried…?

The Smart Grid and Smart Energy initiatives are massive undertakings.  Smart Energy alone involves installing at least two new utility meters into most homes - one for electricity and a second for gas.  Most countries are looking at a timescale of ten years to complete that process.  Even that is probably optimistic - it is a massive undertaking and cost.  However, if these meters are rushed out before the security implications (or other practical implications like wireless interference) are sorted out, this cost could be doubled as that deployment might need to be updated or at worst repeated.

The University of Illinois project addresses the grid, driven by the concern of cybercrime and malicious hacking.  That’s an important project, as damage to the grid, either deliberate or casual has massive consequences, extending through the entire economy.  However, that shouldn’t overshadow the need for security in the home at the Smart Meter level.  They still have the potential to provide pain at many different levels.

What are the risks if we get security wrong in Smart Meters?

• The simplest one is annoyance and cost.  Smart meters don’t just send meter readings to the utilities; they also enable users or service providers to control the devices around our homes, turning them off when they’re not needed, or when energy costs are high.  A breach in security allows this to be manipulated.

At the basic level, this is just an annoyance, but it can pose real dangers.  Turning heating off for an elderly resident, or changing settings at a hospital can kill.  Small manipulations that ignore messages from the utility about higher short term energy costs can cause a bill to rocket. 

Most importantly, anything that reduces customer confidence in smart meters and energy management will result in them reverting to their previous non-smart behaviour.  It is going to be an uphill struggle to persuade consumers to use smart energy techniques to reduce their energy consumption.  To achieve that, the system needs to be water-tight.

• There’s an even more important reason to make sure smart meters are secure.  Utilities are paranoid about security and with good reason.  It’s not just because they want to keep customer data secure - there’s another important reason.  Where there are two or more utility meters in a house, one of them, probably the electricity meter, will act as the common gateway, transmitting data to and from all of the other meters.  This means that other utilities will have to rely on the electricity supplier to carry their data.

The other utilities are paranoid that if the electricity company can gain access to their customer’s usage, then they will be able to offer a competitive package to the user.  Knowledge of household energy usage is gold-dust to a utility.  If there is any evidence that security is weak and might allow data to be read by a competing utility, the utilities will walk away.  For them to participate in sharing a single gateway, their individual data must be secure.

None of the different standards bodies bidding for a part of the Smart Energy market are cavalier about security - they’ve all seen the consequences of getting it wrong and spend considerable time and effort adding it into their specifications.  History shows that this is only one step.  Security is never broken by the standards bodies themselves, it’s broken by others who look at it from a different perspective and try to crack it.  That’s people like Josh.  In general, to get interest from this community, products need to be shipping in appreciable volume, as it’s not that interesting to find holes in something that never gets to market.  The big wireless standards - GSM, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi have all come under this scrutiny.  There are plenty of security attack tools available to test them and they have responded to the flaws that have been exposed.  As a result they’re much better standards.

As ZigBee is positioning itself as a major player in the Smart energy market it’s desperately important for it to submit itself to the same investigation, which is why I welcome the announcement of tools for testing it. 

Josh makes a very eloquent point in his presentation.  “To date, vendors haven’t taken ZigBee security seriously due to the lack of attack tool availability. It’s not going to get better until we have a practical attack surface.”

That excuse is now disappearing. I hope that the ZigBee community makes use of these to test the rigour of its current security mechanisms before it moves to any large scale deployments.

I was at the Wireless Congress in Munich last week and listened to at least four different wireless standards explain why they’re each the best choice for smart meters.  Not one of them was really convincing.  Most had slick marketing presentations, but underneath, there are some very good technical reasons as to why NONE of the current pretenders are the correct one to choose if we really want smart energy to work. 

The critical problem is the choice of the 2.4GHz frequency band, which is where most of the contenders operate.  Ten years ago that portion of spectrum, known as an Industrial Scientific and Medical band (ISM) was virtually empty.   Microwave ovens used it, but only for a few minutes each day.  Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and ZigBee were all still dreams.  It was like a freeway built before cars arrived.  Today it is already congested and each new evolution of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi eat up even more of it.  In another ten years, which is before the Smart Meter rollouts will even have been completed, it is likely to be at a standstill. 

Smart Metering is an initiative that will cost billions of euros / dollars to install and which needs to continue to work for a lifespan of twenty or more years.  All of the prospective wireless technologies being considered for use in Smart Meters operate in open frequency bands that are likely to be heavily congested before the smart meter installation program is even started.  To use this spectrum for something as critical as smart metering is folly.

If Smart Metering is going to provide benefits, it deserves its own wireless spectrum and standard.  It’s not too late for regulators to set aside spectrum and for standards bodies to get together to produce an optimal standard.  If they don’t, we risk wasting trillions of dollars and failing to achieve any reduction in energy consumption.

There is no question that Smart Metering is a good thing.  According to EnOcean - a company in the business of making buildings more efficient, buildings are responsible for 40% of our energy consumption - more than is used for transport. 

Smart meters promise to help reduce that figure significantly.  To operate efficiently, it’s generally agreed that they need a wireless link to connect them to other utility meters within the house, as well as household appliances consuming energy, usage displays and controllers.  Unfortunately there seems to be little consideration of whether the current choices of wireless will work.

According to a speaker in Munich last week, Germany has made the decision to use wireless M-Bus for its smart meters.  They already use M-bus for wired metering and a spokesman made the comment that it was a small step to move to wireless M-Bus.  I hope he wasn’t standing at the edge of a cliff when he thought that strategy up, as his small step could have disastrous consequences.    

I’d like to offer a little history lesson to the Wireless M-Bus folk.  Wireless is different from wired.  It involves adding security, connection methodologies, and both topology and power management.  It took the 802.11 standards group around 13 years to go from their starting point of translating a wired 802.3 connection to the first reliable and interoperable wireless one in the  802.11b specification.  Wireless is not a small step.  If you think that it is and decide to ignore the evidence of history, you run the risk of making a catastrophic mistake that has major ramifications for the future costs of your country’s energy usage.

In terms of the eight or nine different wireless solutions out there are the moment, the best suited are probably ZigBee (because of its mesh capability) and Bluetooth low energy (because of its robustness). 

ZigBee currently leads all of the others in deployments, with the flagship “ZigBee City” network of 255,000 nodes in Goteburg.  (Although if we’re being honest, this isn’t actually using ZigBee.)  This aside, it’s a good example of what can be achieved by adding a mesh technology.  The mesh capabilities mean that the expected need for 3,000 repeaters was reduced to just 17.  (So if you’re in the market for some cheap 802.15.4 repeaters, head for Goteburg.)

The problem is that both ZigBee and Bluetooth low energy (and most of the other contenders) operate at 2.4GHz.  2.4GHz is not an ideal frequency for a fixed in-home application like this, even ignoring the issue of a congested spectrum.  For a start, it suffers from multi-path fading.  That’s not too bad if you’re a frequency hopper, like Bluetooth, but not so good if you’re not, like ZigBee.  For Wireless Standards that sit on fixed channels, it can be a challenge, as there’s no easy way for them to find the best channel to operate on.  Even if they support frequency agility, which is the ability to change their mind, changing channels can result in sleeping nodes getting lost, with battery life being wasted if they have to keep configuring the network.  It’s a particular problem for smart energy applications, as a device’s location is often fixed.  Unlike a mobile phone, you can’t move your gas meter by a couple of metres on a daily basis to find a better signal.

Working at a lower frequencies should help get over this issue.  They’ll also perform better, because they have a greater range.  But there’s very little spectrum available and it’s different in different countries, which doesn’t help with a global solution.  Plus, once again, it’s an open band, so anyone can bring out other products which could eat into the it and stop devices working.

There are other good reasons to work at lower frequencies.  The radios are simpler to design, they use less power and they have greater range.  Which all help with making meters cost-effective.  The only negative factor is that as the frequency decreases, the antenna for an effective range gets larger.  In practice, that means there’s a sweet spot for this application somewhere between about 300MHz and 600MHz.  That will give full house coverage at reasonable power with an antenna that can fit within consumer devices.

If the EU and US Governments are serious, and want to enable energy savings in a form that will continue working for the next twenty years, then they ought to set aside some spectrum for it to happen.  Choosing the range / antenna size sweet spot suggests that it should be between 300 MHz and 600 MHz.  The band should be dedicated to smart energy and have three or more channels to let the radios have the flexibility to cope with multipath issues.

As we turn off our analogue TV channels, regulators could easily dedicate some of this spectrum for smart energy.  It means they won’t be able to sell it off for broadcasting more sport or porn, but the world probably needs that rather less than it does reduced energy usage.

In the next twelve months we’ll start to see the results of some of the first deployments based on current technologies.  Some of the whispers I’ve heard suggest that they are less than impressive.  That suggests that the issues I’ve covered above are already rearing their heads.  If that’s the case, then what we have at the moment still needs to go through several generations of development to produce something close to useable. 

Doesn’t is make more sense for the industry to forget their egos and sit down to design something that is fit for purpose, rather than being cobbled together.  It is always difficult to free up wireless spectrum, because it is a limited and valuable resource.  But there is little more valuable in the medium and longer term than trying to control and contain our energy usage.

Why combine standards instead of just shifting frequencies?  Because no single one contains all of the best features.  Bluetooth low energy was designed from a clean sheet of paper to give the lowest possible power and benefits from hind-sight, improving on most of what has gone before.  ZigBee can offer the mesh that makes deployment simpler.  And both understand the importance of a qualification and conformance regime to enforce interoperability.

Some companies will argue that the choice must be made now.  In some cases that’s because they’re pinned their future on smart energy and need to sell their chips now if they’re going to survive.  That should not force a Government’s hand.   Smart Energy is a solution for the world’s future, not a short term bail-out for a few start-ups.

It will take time to develop a new standard and take it to market.  But the alternative is to iterate the current solutions for two to three years to the point where they just about work.  That leaves a real possibility that they will fall over in eight to ten years time as other devices moves into the same spectrum. At which point someone has to pay to upgrade the complete system.

So let me issue this challenge to the EU and US Governments.  If you really believe in Smart Energy and Energy conservation, forget being mugged by one of the current wireless technologies and set aside some suitable dedicated wireless spectrum for your smart energy applications.  Then bang the heads of the standards groups together to come up with a solution that combines the best parts of each to solve the problem.  Smart Energy is not a short term - it needs to work for successive generations.