Net Work April 2025

In this month’s Net Work I report on forthcoming ‘energy smart appliances’ and a reader highlights problems looming with ‘Economy 7’ electricity meters.  I also reflect on nearly 30 years of using the Internet, from this magazine column’s early days to the present day, as I sign off for the time being.

I wrote back in Net Work, January 2020, how the concept of a Smart Meter Home Area Network (SMHAN) would alter for ever the way that householders used appliances such as dishwashers, tumble dryers or electric vehicle chargers. Industry and the Government are now talking about a new generation of ‘energy smart appliances’ (ESAs) as a way of managing ‘Demand Side Response’ (DSR) – itself defined as ‘a means of changing electricity consumption in a way that benefits the electricity system’.

ESAs have yet to materialize, but the technical standards are now being hammered out. Once connected to a household’s SMHAN, energy smart domestic appliances would ‘know’ what the cheapest tariffs are at any time of day, and optimise the consumer’s energy usage and billing accordingly. This may well appeal to EV owners especially.

The UK Government has published a paper on Smart Meters, Demand-Side Response and SMHAN’s here (PDF).

Appliances are getting Smarter

To see which way we’re heading, the British Standards Institute offers heavy reading (PDF) in a publically-available specification (PAS) at https://www.bsigroup.com/globalassets/localfiles/en-th/about-bsi/energy-smart-appliances-programme/bsi-pas-1878-energy-smart-appliances-system-functionality-and-architecture-th.pdf.

My guess is that by the end of the decade, consumers will routinely sleepwalk into accepting this method of silently controlling their electricity consumption. Whether ESAs will make much difference to our energy supplies though, we will just have to see.

In this month’s magazine column I also reveal which new solar farm, six years in the planning and having just gone online, was severely damaged by a storm!

Not so Economical

There are problems looming for legacy meter users as well. Regular reader David Platt dropped me a line about another energy-saving issue he’s wrestling with:

Being a retired coal power shift operations engineer, I follow your comments about the future progress of new energy generation with great interest, especially the advancement of SMRs, wind, solar and wave power.

I have what is known as a “GEC Radio Teleswitch” (RTS) feeding a Siemens Normal/ Low metering device. Are you aware that in June 2025 Octopus Energy is “cutting off” the Economy 7 radio signal, which is what my meter requires to operate properly? They propose giving me a new-fangled dumb smart meter instead. Is this signal cut-off common for all Energy Providers, or is this just a way to roll out the Government’s dumb smart meters? Can we stop the signal “cut-off”? Yours, David Platt MIET.

Actually the issue David highlighted relates to the abandonment of the 1980s RTS long wave transmission which takes effect on 30th June, after being postponed from 2024. The LW radio signal technology is deemed obsolete and unserviceable, so naturally all the electricity suppliers (not just Octopus) are pushing smart meters as its natural replacement. Some 600,000 meters are reportedly affected, and there isn’t really any technological alternative on offer today.

For non-UK readers, Economy 7 and Economy 10 are cost-saving electricity tariffs that use a radio-controlled device to switch certain meters to cheaper off-peak rates, for seven or ten hours. There is more information about the RTS changeover here:  https://www.energy-uk.org.uk/publications/energy-uk-explains-the-smart-meter-network-switch-radio-teleswitch-service/

If no smart meter is fitted, then the end user must bear the cost of ripping out the old equipment and updating his wiring. David later wrote to say that he had resigned himself to scouting around for a smart ‘dumb’ meter after all.

Going full circle

The first Net Work column in August 1996 was just a single page, written to support users grappling with a newly-emerging fad called the Internet.

For many 1990s home computer owners in the UK, America’s CompuServe Information Services offered a ‘walled garden’ of CIS forums and Emailing using the CompuServe messaging system. A 1990s video entitled ‘The Kid’s Guide to the Internet’ was a nostalgic (but cringeworthy) intro that captured the zeitgeist 30 years ago. It’s on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfMrVKnGzwg.

^ Inside Amazon’s first book warehouse in Seattle. Founder Jeff Bezos being interviewed for TV by Robert Cringely in 1998.

In Britain, a fixed-rate ‘raw’ Internet service was first supplied in the 1990s by London-based Demon Internet, in the shape of their “Tenner a month” (TAM) account.  Early Windows TCP/IP communications software barely existed, and no-frills, text-only DOS implementations such as KA9Q were provided by Demon Internet (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KA9Q).

If nothing else, these tentative steps were a promising start, and then in 1995 new Turnpike for Windows software was launched. It unified a dialer, E-mail, Usenet and other tools, making Internet access much more productive. Turnpike is described on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnpike_(software).  It mentions my own software review. (I still have the box and disks somewhere.)

The demand for Internet access led to more British households ordering second lines, but there simply weren’t enough phone lines to go round. The temporary solution was ‘DACSing’ (Digital Access Carrier System) as a form of ‘line splitting’ which British Telecom introduced to provide ‘virtual’ phone lines, as noted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_access_carrier_system. Mercifully, I escaped the dreaded DACS.

Reaching the peak

My nostalgic journey over the past 30 years brings me full circle to the present day. My worklab, which started life with 14.4k dial-up, has reached what is probably ‘peak Internet’ as, against all odds, I successfully installed fibre to the premises a few months ago.

(Above right: Turnpike was Demon Internet’s Windows TCP/IP software that included a dialer, network tools, an Email client and Usenet newsreader. It centralised the job of connecting and using the Internet.)

Thanks to a local ‘alt-net’ supplier, I now enjoy a more than adequate 300 Mbps download speed, with up to 1Gbps being possible – 70,000 times faster than my original dial-up. You can check your own broadband speed at https://www.nperf.com/en/

Installation and setup were free, thanks to the UK Government’s Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS). The information at  https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gigabit-broadband-voucher-scheme-information/gigabit-broadband-voucher-scheme-information was incorrect, though, and you should check the score with your chosen fibre supplier first.

^ The speed checker at NPerf.com will display your Internet connection’s throughput and latency.

^ The author’s original ‘Information Superhighway’ from the 1990s –  this telephone extension reel connected a BT phone socket to a newly-installed 14.4k internal modem, and we went online for the first time!

I’m told that the entire world’s phone calls could pass through my single fibre optic connection. Maybe that’s sales patter, but things have come a long way since the 1990s when, just to check my email, I would unfurl a phone extension cable (shown above) across the landing, like a sapper laying explosives, so that I could plug my modem into the phone socket upstairs.

Doubtless, the arrival of full fibre broadband will open up new avenues to explore and keep me entertained and interested. Sadly this month’s Net Work column is the last in the regular series. First appearing in the August 1996 issue, after nearly 29 years I’m now taking a well-earned break, but I hope that Net Work contributions will still appear periodically well into the future.

I hope they’ve helped inform readers of new trends heading our way, as well as offering handy ‘heads-up’ reminders about getting the best from some current technologies. Many thanks to my regular readers for your feedback and kind comments and, in the meantime, I can still be contacted by Email to alan@epemag.net as always, or via my website at www.alanwinstanley.com