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Concord reports near-complete residential meter installs, gateway issues and plans for fiber-backed meter links
Summary
CMLP said residential advanced metering is over 99% complete, commercial installs are underway, but some Eaton gateways have failed and the mesh re-pathing can take hours or days. Staff are pursuing IP-linked meters that can use the town'bs fiber as a backup gateway and are building a local server to bridge Eaton'bs hosted environment.
CMLP staff reported the advanced metering initiative is over 99% complete for residential meters with under 70 residential installs remaining and about 9% of commercial installs finished. Staff said Eaton is carrying out remaining reprogramming steps.
In Q&A, Jason and staff described gateway reliability issues: the meter network uses a self-healing mesh that can re-path when a gateway goes down, but in practice re-pathing sometimes takes hours or days, and several gateways have been returned for repair. That delay can be acceptable for billing but problematic for outage detection and customer consumption monitoring.
Staff described mitigation steps: Eaton is contractually obligated to a service level for connectivity and is working on fixes; CMLP holds biweekly project meetings and recently hosted gateway and meter experts on-site. Separately, CMLP has installed roughly 70'100 IP-link meters that can use the broadband fiber network as a backup gateway. Because Eaton'bs hosted architecture blocks that traffic pattern, staff are building a local server to collect meter data from the ONT and pass it into Eaton's system to create a faster backup path.
Board members asked about long-term monitoring and RNS/load-profile education for the board; staff agreed to provide more education on substation load profiles and time-of-use implications in upcoming meetings.
