Energy companies are already undertaking programmes to replace traditional customer-premises meters with “smart meters”.

Connected to the internet, these smart meters can transmit, process and receive a range of operational data, for use by both energy suppliers and their customers. Benefits include an end to the need to for energy companies to send people to read their customers’ meters, and the ability for customers to make more informed choices when making such decisions as which energy supplier to pick, and how they use energy within their homes or business premises. Over the next few years, a huge number of smart meters will come on stream around the world.

In the UK, for example, around 5 million smart meters had been installed by March 2017, but the UK Government’s target is to equip the majority of the country’s 26 million homes with smart meters by 2020. Increasingly, the technology of choice for connecting these smart meters to the internet is the public mobile network, especially now that NB-IoT and LTE-M are improving the mobile network’s suitability for these IoT-type installations.