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This week, we’re talking about the latest attempt to defeat smart meters’ worst nemesis, helping utilities integrate renewable energy, blockchain explorers, and more.

Every utility metering rollout has two coverage maps. The first is in the proposal: gateways on rooftops and towers, coverage circles overlapping neatly across the service area. The second appears after installation, when the read-rate reports come back and a stubborn slice of meters never checks in. These are the meters bolted inside basements, sunk in curbside pits under cast-iron lids, or tucked behind the reinforced walls of apartment blocks. They were the hard ones long before anyone connected them to a network. Human meter readers often couldn’t reach meters in awkward locations and had to come back, and that cost per read is a big reason most utilities checked meters only monthly. Radios were supposed to make a meter's location irrelevant, and for most meters they did. For the last stretch, physics still wins. The cost of beating it has become one of the less discussed factors in whether a large IoT deployment pencils out.

Metering is where this problem is largest, because metering is where massive IoT actually got massive. In a recap of last year's Enlit show, the LoRa Alliance estimated that about a quarter of deployed LoRaWAN end devices are smart meters, with water metering leading gas and electric. Veolia alone has 3.3 million water meters online in France, and Netmore is running a 1.1-million-meter project in the UK. At that scale, a few percentage points of unreachable devices means tens of thousands of meters, and utilities can't write them off. Near-100% read rates are often a regulatory requirement as well as a commercial one. A meter that never reports leaves the utility estimating that customer's bill and unable to see a leak at that address. The standard fix is densification: add gateways closer together until the signal reaches the stragglers. It works, but it's expensive. By Netmore's figures, covering the last 10% of devices on a public network this way can raise total network capital spending by 30% or more. A small fraction of the fleet ends up driving a large share of the build cost.

Late last month, Netmore, Itron, and Abeeway validated a standards-based alternative across a complete water metering stack. It pairs Itron's Cyble 5 module, which retrofits mechanical meters with LoRaWAN connectivity and has a 15-year design life, with a battery-powered Abeeway relay built to the LoRa Alliance's TS011 spec. The relay sits near the problem meters and passes their traffic to the existing network. It handles up to 15 devices without any change to the meters, and Netmore's platform configures it remotely using standard MAC commands. Relay itself is not new. LoRa Alliance members were demonstrating relay for metering at Enlit in 2023. What's new is that a module maker, a relay maker, and a network operator have tested the whole chain together and called it ready for production. That changes where the money goes. A utility no longer has to densify across an entire service area to reach scattered dead spots. It can spend only where the dead spots are, one cluster of basements at a time.

The relay is part of a broader shift in how massive IoT networks get around concrete: they add or borrow small pieces of infrastructure right next to the devices instead of building bigger infrastructure farther away. Akenza has described running LoRaWAN over a building’s existing distributed antenna system, the cabling and antennas already installed to carry cellular signal indoors. At Switzerland's Barcuns hydroelectric dam, where some monitoring devices are embedded in the concrete itself, that meant putting LoRaWAN onto a radio cable more than 12 kilometers long that already ran through the structure and its tunnels. Approaches like these weaken an old argument against unlicensed LPWAN in cities. A common rule of thumb, laid out in an IoT For All comparison of LoRaWAN and NB-IoT, holds that NB-IoT handles walls and dense urban settings better, which makes it the default for water and electric systems, while LoRaWAN is best for static outdoor devices. That rule assumed the only way to reach a buried meter was a stronger signal from farther away. When a battery-powered box mounted near the meters can do the job, the choice between technologies comes down more to cost and less to radio physics.

“Satellite IoT” isn’t one thing. The term gets slapped on everything from a battery-powered tracker sending a location update every few hours to a smartphone messaging home from a satellite, and the industry’s marketing hasn’t done buyers any favors by treating those as the same technology.

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In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Patrick Ferriter, SVP of Product at Agora, joins Ryan Chacon to discuss building real-time voice AI experiences, even on bad networks. The conversation covers what physical AI means, moving from controlled demos to the real world, architecting a voice AI experience for high latency networks, physical AI uses cases, AI companions, using edge or cloud for AI, privacy and security, and the future of conversational AI devices.

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