Smart meters have been deployed for decades at U.S. electric, water, and gas utilities, delivering business value from the customer to the operations side. One persistent challenge: the cellular networks that underpin smart metering don't stand still. When networks evolve, spectrum gets refarmed, or coverage shifts, single-carrier SIMs cannot adapt. The result is truck rolls, lost telemetry, and rising operational costs compounding across millions of devices over a 15–20 year deployment lifecycle.
New SGP .32 eSIM (eUICC) standards enable full coverage with multiple profiles and future-ready connectivity — but they introduce a critical tradeoff: power-intensive network switching can compromise the battery life that smart meters depend on to remain operational for decades.
In this exclusive Energy Central PowerSession, a telecom industry analyst and a IoT connectivity subject matter expert will explain how the new standard resolves this tradeoff — enabling resilient connectivity without sacrificing battery life, managed via a unified connectivity management platform (CMP). We'll explore how a North American water utility deployed a new generation of meters across a geographically dispersed service area — including underground vaults and remote sites where physical SIM replacement is both disruptive and costly — and how the eSIM is paving the path forward.
We hope you can join us for this live PowerSession on August 4th.
Panelists:
Mike Smith, Moderator
Steffan Sorrell, Chief of Research, Kaleido Intelligence
Jerome Coppens, Product Director, IoT Connected Services, Semtech Corporation
