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In France the electricity meter talks to the provider through the power line. And my newly installed water meter reports water consumption through a custom rad
by d--b 3y ago
In France the electricity meter talks to the provider through the power line.
And my newly installed water meter reports water consumption through a custom radio module.
It sounds completely stupid to rely on 3G networks which are spotty or out of reach in many places. They’re probably more expensive too and take up some connections to the antenna.
- matthewmcg 3y agoMy municipal water meter transmits readings in the clear on the 915 MHz band. There's a neat program to catch the readings: https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr
- jacquesm 3y agoGood then burglars can check for occupancy remotely, helps them to target your house when you're not there.
- TheGeminon 3y agoThey could also check the physical meter for that, or if they are wardriving for the signal they could likely pick up the presence/lack of WiFi/5G/LTE signals which would probably be even more accurate than power usage.
- jacquesm 3y agoDepends on whether or not the physical meter is exposed and that would require them to go by in person.
- JCharante 3y ago1. You can sit in a car and read the meters for multiple houses at once, you actually need to trespass to read the physical meter 2. At home devices will still generate traffic, stuff like ring cameras, any laptops that are set to wakeup on network requests, ipads left behind, tons of smart devices. Water meter sounds like less of a hassle. 3. I don’t think most people use 5G or LTE at home, most would use wifi. 4. You could probably convince gullible people into buying a traffic spoofer device that acts as a residential vpn exit node by saying that criminals can detect when you’re on vacation by reading your wifi usage. Like those devices that will turn your TV on while you’re on vacation.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- frumper 3y agoTime to set up some random watering timers so that can join my lights to turn on and off at random times
- sanderjd 3y agoIt's just a tradeoff. There are advantages to consolidating on the same infrastructure for many different use cases. There is a much larger critical mass of people working on cellular technologies than on the technologies necessary to communicate via power lines or custom radios. But of course there are also disadvantages, and this is one of them. There is always a balance between concentrating effort behind a single solution, and having that solution be a single point of failure.