They charge you $10/mo immediately if you refuse the install. Customers
are not going to pay that. Shielding them does no good when there are
dozens or a hundred more all around the customers you're trying to serve.
They committed to some millions of GE 900 FHSS meters, of course made in
GE factories in China. The cost of the meter doubles to go licensed, or
so they say, so there's no way in hell they will be changing over to
licensed now.
Hey, I'm all for smart grid and all that crap. If they can see precisely
where outages are, good. That means they'll get shit fixed faster,
right? The pessimist in me says, yeah OK, I'm sure they'll get right on
that.
On 12/15/2015 7:58 PM, Bill Prince wrote:
I talked some with a technician that came out to install the
smartmeter on our house a month or two ago.
We are in limbo. I didn't tell them they couldn't install it, but I
told them it would have to lock out specific frequencies if they
didn't want me to wrap it in a Faraday cage. He elected to defer the
installation. We have been going around like this for 3 or 4 years,
and they still haven't installed our smartmeter.
No big deal. All of our neighbors still get their meters read by the
old, manual method. Seems the meters are too far apart to actually
work anyway. In the mean time, they just pollute the 900 MHz band.
He told me that PG&E was switching over to ~~ 450 MHz (I don't know
the exact frequencies) because they needed better range than they
could get at 900 MHz. In fact, he said they were licensing whatever
frequencies they are switching over to. I'll believe it when I see it.
bp
<part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com>
On 12/15/2015 5:49 PM, George Skorup wrote:
Ouch. That's what I was worried about. Now ComEd is going to roll out
smart meters across their entire service area in about a year and I
fear we're going to have to abandon 900 altogether because of it.
Guess we'll be trying some TVWS, until they shit on that too.
On 12/15/2015 7:33 PM, Ken Hohhof wrote:
Had to go to 5 MHz channel to stay registered, 1X MIMO-A, about 2
Mbps aggregate throughput on linktests. That's useless.
I can't say I'm all that surprised, the signals are bad and the
interference is worse. But the only way to find out was to try it.
-----Original Message----- From: George Skorup
Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2015 7:25 PM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] 900 MHz 450i report
So what did you get, about 10dB SNR and 5Mbps of throughput?
On 12/15/2015 7:19 PM, Ken Hohhof wrote:
We swapped out an FSK AP in a high interference area today. No
magic, works about the same.
Too bad, even the installer liked the SM and antenna. Even the
coax boots are nice.
Will probably work well for those of you who don't have -65 noise
floors.
We are going to have to give up on 900 MHz at this location. This
was the last gasp.
