POLOKWANE – The Polokwane Municipality said significant progress has been made in updating pre-paid meters as part of the Token Identifier (TID) rollover process.

According to Eskom, all prepaid meters based on Standard Transfer Specification (STS) technology will stop accepting new credit tokens when these vending codes expire. This will mean they will stop dispensing electricity after the existing credit is used up, thus making the meter inactive.

“Each credit token has a unique TID encoded in the 20 digits to prevent token replay at the meter. The TID is referenced to a base date 1993 and will run out of range on November 24 (known as the TID rollover event), thus causing the pre-paid meter to stop accepting new tokens,” their website reads.

The STS Association says the technical remedy is to “reset” each meter to reference a new base date of 2014 by entering two special tokens before November 2024.

Municipal spokesperson Thipa Selala told the Polokwane Review-Observer that 96% of the city’s meters have been successfully updated.

“The remaining 4% consists of meters that could not be located during our team’s on-site audits. This may be due to changes in property status or inactive usage patterns,” he said.

Selala explains that the municipality initiated the update process in 2021 and completed the majority of the updates in December 2023.

“The outstanding meters reflect cases where users may no longer be actively purchasing electricity tokens, suggesting these meters might no longer be in use. We are confident that the TID rollover process has been successfully concluded,” he said.

Selala adds that residents whose meters are currently disconnected are encouraged to visit the Civic Centre or any cluster office as it may be tied to outstanding municipal account payments.

“We encourage affected customers to visit the Civic Centre or any of our cluster offices to arrange payment terms. The municipality remains committed to ensuring that any service interruptions due to faults are promptly resolved by our electrical department,” he said.

For water meter requests, customers are advised to visit office 110 on the Civic Centre’s first floor and for all electricity meter requests, customers should visit container nine at the back office parking.