Tick-tock! Time fleeting for electrical meter upgrades
The countdown to November 24, 2024, officially kicked off, leaving residents with just one year and four months to update their prepaid electricity boxes, or risk having their families plunged back into the dark ages.
Residents of Wards 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 have until August 10 to upgrade their meters.
This only includes residents of Extension 24 and Rockdale (Ward 6), Extension 24, Nasaret, Rondebosch and Sam Rose (Ward 8), Eastdene, Hlalamnandi, Rondebosch (Ward 10), Naledi, Lesedi, Eastdene, Middelburg Mall, Mineralia, Extension 18, Vaalbank, Industrial (Ward 11), Aerorand (Ward 12), Part of the CBD (Ward 13), Gholfsig, Clubville and Extension 23 (Ward 14), part of the CBD and Kanonkop (Ward 15) and Kanonkop and Dennesig (Ward 16).
Residents should visit their nearest vendor or pay point with the municipal prepaid card to receive a code and instructions.
New meters will have to be installed for those who don’t comply, at a cost to the consumer.
All Standard Transfer Specification (STS) compliant electricity meters will be unable to load new tokens after the deadline, due to a Y2K-style rollover time lapse.
An estimated 90 million of these meters are spread across more than 100 countries worldwide.
The meter conundrum is essentially due to a design function which attaches a section of the 20-digit token code to the exact minute the token was issued.
The STS generates tokens that can only be used by the intended meter, and in the case of credit tokens, can only be used once transferred to the meter.
All meters rolled out since January 1993 were built with the automatic time-out expiry date, with a 224 token limitation attached to each meter.
The TID is a 24-bit field, contained in STS-compliant tokens, that identifies the date and time the token was generated, equaling approximately 16 million minutes, 279 thousand hours, 11 650 days, or approximately 32 years.
Each credit token has a unique token identifier (TID) encoded into the 20 digits to prevent token replay at the meter.
Any tokens generated after this date and utilising the 24-digit TID, calculated on base date 1993, will be rejected by the meters as being old tokens, with the token value reduced to zero.
The SA Local Government Association has warned that non-compliant municipalities face a significant risk to the service levels, sales and revenue collection.
The TID software rollover requires substantial time, effort and resources on the part of the municipalities.
Compulsory changes are area specific and will be done in phases.
