Nearly a million UK households will have 'smart meters' to manage their gas supplies by the end of 2012. Vodafone UK has said it's supporting British Gas in the roll-out of smart metering in the UK. Each smart meter will have a mobile GPRS connection, enabling real-time energy usage data to be submitted to British Gas.
Last year we reported that 2.4% of all mobile phone connections in Europe are already controlled by machines, not people – and global operator revenue for wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) communications was expected to jump from €3 billion in 2008 to €8.9 billion in 2012.