John Stracke writes: > Utility companies would love to be able to stop > sending out expensive humans just to read one > dial at each customer each month.
Where I live, they already have. The new meters are individually addressable and will report the consumption they record on demand from a central controller. They don't require any special wiring; I was told that they use the pipes of the water system to communicate with the controller--apparently the usable bandwidth of that channel is enough to allow the very limited communication required by the application. Of course, with low-cost IP dialtone or something similar, such a device could be connected to the Internet. I would not want it to be a device that could accept commands to turn off the water or some such, because of the danger of abuse, but certainly reporting the water consumption seems quite reasonable. One can imagine the same for soft-drink machines, copying machines, and all sorts of other appliances. Right now some of them already work in this way, except that, like the water meter, they rely on out-of-band communication methods (from the Internet point of view).
