Creative Connectivity

Posh Boys push Smart Meters

DECC – the Government department leading the Smart Metering deployment in the UK recently published their latest research on consumer attitudes to Smart Metering. It reports the results of in depth interviews with 120 representative members of the population on their feelings about Smart Meters and IHDs.

The research was conducted in February this year, several months before the Conservative backbencher Nadine Dorries described her Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne as “two posh boys who don’t know the price of a pint of milk”. She wasn’t referring to the UK Smart Metering programme, but it was a pretty good description of what these 120 respondents thought of the smart meter deployment, telling researchers that it “sounds like it’s from someone who doesn’t have trouble paying their bills”.

The report is not all bad news. The respondents included people who had received In Home Energy Displays and in general they liked them. They thought they provided real benefits. In contrast, they had difficulty in seeing what the added value of the smart meter was.

I suspect DECC is busy trying to massage the results to make it look as if the survey supported smart metering, helped by some rather ambiguous leading questions. But the content highlights a growing division within the smart metering programme, which is whether it is meant to be there for the benefit of consumers or for the benefit of utilities?

The Cost of Wireless Standards

How much does it cost to produce a wireless standard? And how long does it take? Surprisingly those aren’t questions that are asked very often – probably because most developers are happy to use what already exists rather than starting again from scratch.

In the UK, some members of the smart metering programme have begun asking these questions, potentially for the wrong reasons. They’ve realised that ZigBee – the current front-runner for the UK smart metering deployment, can’t provide the range to cope with every single house or block of flats, and have started wondering about whether it might make sense to start again from scratch.

A few years ago, when I was writing my book on the Essentials of Short Range Wireless I attempted to put some numbers to those questions. It seems an appropriate time to publish them, as the answers are a lot more and a lot longer than most people think.

Rigoletto and the Automaton
(or Shaking up the NHS)

I’ve always thought that the music for the opening chorus of Rigoletto foreshadowed the modern party political conference. It is a piece about court sycophancy and conspiracy which says everything about political intrigue.

There’s a long tradition of resetting opera to make satirical points. Ned Sherrin and Alistair Beaton did it in the Kinnock and Thatcher era with the Metropolitan Mikado and the Ratepayer’s Iolanthe. More recently Music Theatre London set the trend for pithy new translations which led to a resurgence of exciting new small scale opera productions. But we seem to have lost the politics.

Rigoletto feels as if its authors had anticipated our most recent political incumbents – the powerful, confident stride of Blair the leader, imperiously parting the faithful as he strides with his sycophantic train to the dais. And in the shadows the poison dwarf, reviled by the rest of the party, who will ultimately aid his leader’s downfall, played by Alistair Campbell. I often thought there was great scope for a New Labour Rigoletto with that pair and possibly Prescott as a lumbering Sparafucile. But the opportunity passed by.

However, when Andrew Lansley started putting forward his health reforms, with the Lib-Dems performing U-turns on a daily basis I realised that the music and story fitted the current administration just as well.

Switching and the Smart Energy Market

Back in 1776 Adam Smith made the observation that England is a Nation of Shopkeepers (although Napoleon usually gets the credit for the phrase). If either were alive today they’d probably reconsider and point out that we’re now a nation of Switchers. Nowhere is that more true than our attitude towards energy suppliers. According to OFGEM, over 76% of us have switched our energy supplier in the last ten years. Around 26% of us do it every year.

For some reason, we love switching. Our favourite TV adverts are for comparison sites. One – the advert for Compare the Market uses a family of animated meerkats which have become so popular they’ve spawned a range of merchandise. Whether it’s insurance, energy, mobile phone plans, broadband or saving plans, we’re addicted. And nowhere more so than with switching energy provider.

It’s not just the websites urging us to do that. Government ministers keep on telling us that to get the best energy price we should switch suppliers. Their message is not to use less energy – just change supplier. And part of their plan for smart metering is to make it even easier to switch – as often as once a day. It’s creating a very interesting dynamic for the industry, but one that is about to change.

Making the NHS a Global Brand

The current debate about the future of the NHS starts with a correct observation, which is that continuing in its current form is untenable. As the population ages and we get more complex treatment regimes, then, unless we change our approach to healthcare, the numbers don’t add up. But all the Government’s proposed reforms are doing is rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. I’d like to suggest something more radical, which is to think about how to make it self-funding, without increasing the strain on the public purse. Not by privatising it, but by extracting value from it and then exporting that value. In other words, let’s see if we can make the NHS a global brand and turn it into something that can generate revenue.

Before you dismiss it, stop and think. We’ve already done it with the BBC, which Superbrands rates as the fifth strongest brand in the UK. The BBC is respected and earns money around the world. Why don’t we think of the NHS in the same way? It doesn’t feature in any list of brands because nobody thinks of it like that. But there are some very good reasons why it should, particularly if we want it to be affordable in the future. The current Government (and every one before it) is missing a trick.

The NHS probably contains more data about treatment and outcomes than any other medical institution in the world. And so it should. For much of its life it’s been one of the world’s largest employers, accumulating detailed information on generations of the UK’s 60 million citizens. That’s an awful lot of “big data”. So here’s the question – “If we could extract and monetise that value, could we make the NHS pay for itself?” We need to extract that value and use it, then export the resulting expertise to make money from the rest of the world.

A UK Roadmap for Smart Metering HANs

One of the eternal complaints about short range wireless is its limited range, particularly when used within homes. Whilst the name “short range wireless” ought to give a clue about the existence of the problem, it doesn’t stop a general level of indignation when a radio signal doesn’t make it through the walls of your house.

Up until now this was mostly an annoyance, largely because it was a personal problem. By that I mean it was an inconvenient truth that individuals discovered when they bought a consumer wireless product, whether that was a Wi-Fi access point, a cordless phone or a mobile headset. As these were generally low cost, discretionary purchases, users either took them back, put them in a cupboard and forgot about them, or worked around the problem by moving the appropriate access point. For the more technically engaged, a raft of companies grew up making repeaters, range extenders, power amplifiers and directional antennae, allowing users to exacerbate the problem by swamping all of their neighbours’ installations.

In the last year people have started to take the middle word of “short range wireless” rather more seriously. That’s come about as governments around the world have mandated deployments of smart meters. Whilst no-one cared too much if a consumer product didn’t work, smart meters are a different kettle of fish. They need to be able to connect with the other components of the smart metering wireless network in the home in order to send consumption data back to the utilities. They have to do that reliably and regularly over a period of many years. And they need to be able to cope with a wide variety of homes – from small bungalows to multi-storey apartment buildings. All of a sudden that “range” word is getting a lot of attention.

The problem is that the wireless standards being considered don’t cover 100% of different homes. Any one standard probably struggles with covering much more than 75% of potential homes. That’s a big problem for regulators and civil servants who have a very black and white view of life – when a mandate says “all”, they assume that means every last home. So what can they do?