anyone else think smart meters are interfering with home broadband and phone reception?

[CleverClogg]

we have one smart meter, but honestly, the broadband and phone reception became unreliable the day it was fitted several years ago, and in spite of engineers visits, and new routers and everything, it never got back to what it was. Other utility companies also want to fit smart meters, but I have said no, and keep saying no, in case it does further damage. Now getting penalised as no access to data, or tariffs or services that other people who agree to installation of smart meters have

Yes!!

Ever since we have had it our internet connection regularly drops off. It will happen at roughly the same time every evening, so all I can think is that it is when the info is sent. It can happen other times as well, I should actually start writing down the time, instead of just thinking "there it goes again"

I wish I had never had the bleeding thing fitted, but the energy company were pretty much harassing me, and scared me with warnings of dire consequences for my old meter.

OMG yes!!!!

I’ve said this for ages and people think I’m nuts. It’s improved since I permanently unplugged it

My internet cuts out every night at 12.13 am. Weirdly

….same!

Are you with Sky?

My internet is noticeably slower than it used to be. Now that people use streaming services, and gamers are gaming online, I suspect the available bandwidth is being used up, causing queueing of the data IYSWIM.

No problem here.

People consuming more and more data via fttp leaves less capacity for those left on fttc.
Are you on fttp?

I have constantly refused to have a smart meter have always had complete control over how much energy I use and have always stayed on quarterly
(they hate that) and our bills are so low even in winter. Have a couple of friends who said theirs is causing havoc with broadband. Honestly the tactics our electricity company tried up to now to get us to have a smart meter even tried threatening us with court action 🤣🤣 still laughing at that one.

I don't know, what is fttp?

We keep being badgered by British Gas to get a smart meter. Engineers have come twice and said, because we have very poor mobile reception we can't have a smart meter. Don’t know if this adds anything to this discussion though.

I don't think I'll ever find out as nobody in our part of the world has one.
There don't seem to be any available.

Bearing in mind our broadband cuts out three or four times a day anyway, without a smart meter, I dread to think what it'd be like if we did have one.

Smart meters dont use your WiFi.
They use a network designed for smart meters. From what I recall, it's closer to a mobile.phone signal than WiFi etc. so it'd interrupt mobile phones or radio before WiFi signals.

Recently broadband has been really patchy and we still have a really old spinning wheel meter.

You can't unplug a smart meter.

Yes I am

Well I just took mine out the wall

It’s a Sky issue 100%

Presume YorkshirePudding is referring to the display? If so, perhaps the display has some bearing on signals being affected but I doubt it 🤔

Would love to know if there was legal way of turning the damn smart meter off permanently though!!

People think the display unit IS the Smart Meter. There is a lot of confusion.

Yes, we're Sky too.

DH and I googled for hours, but it was just lots of threads like this, with people acknowledging there seemed to be an issue, but never found any solutions.

Putting the display elsewhere in the house helped a little, but it still drops with it totally off.

Smart meters use the 2G mobile network to communicate, the network they all use is provided by O2.

They won't interfere with your fixed broadband connection, mainly because mobile networks and fixed broadband are not the same thing.

Also you can't just "unplug" a smart meter. What people who say that are doing is unplugging the display, this will make sod all difference to your broadband speeds or connection.

I suspect what we have here is a case if causation vs correlation seeing as smart meters were rolled out at scale at the same time many households increased the amount of devices connected to their wifi and the amount of streaming they are doing.

Sky does do overnight housekeeping upgrades, software Etc including the DLM system lasts around five minutes apparently.

So, the Smart Meter comes in two parts - the unit that does the measurement (the actual meter) and the in home display (IHD). The meter sends data back to energy companies using two main options; either the 2G/3G phone network or a dedicated low power radio network. Neither of these are anywhere near the wifi bandwidth or infrastructure so shouldn't interfere.

But inside the home the smart meter talks to the IHD on a protocol known as Zigbee, which is the same radio frequency as WiFi. In theory your IHD should be designed to rule this out. And if it does compete the WiFi should be a much stronger signal so should win any contest.

Still, if you think there is a problem it might be worth either asking your retailer for a new IHD or replacing the router, since it's equally possible that the router is the unit where the settings aren't the right standard (technically, the router is using the wrong channel). There's a very good...detailed...explanation of how this all works here. Smart meter geekery

You may have unplugged your In Home Display but that is not a smart meter.