Digital giant Vodacom has entered the Emfuleni smart meter arena, working with the existing service provider, BXC, thereby signaling the ultimate digitalisation of all water and electricity pre-paid meters in a region infamous for its culture of resistance and non-payment for services.

BXC has in turn fully welcomed Vodacom into Emfuleni, and has committed to full cooperation on the journey to complete digitalisation of pre-paid and other metering for the Emfuleni Local Municipality (ELM).

“BXC has always been committed to improving service delivery in Emfuleni and to that extent we fully welcome Vodacom and expect their input to further enhance service delivery and customer satisfaction,” said BXC Project Manager Dawid Dirks.

ELM, BXC, Vodacom and Eskom have already held a major technical working conference in Emfuleni last week to sort out and address identified co-ordination issues, ELM has confirmed.

Vodacom will bring its own stable of service providers but will not be in direct competition with BXC, which already has more than 4,000 water and electricity smart meters installed in the region and operates under a pre-existing contract with predetermined targets.

BXC and Vodacom will be dividing Emfuleni up into installation areas and will thus not install in the same areas, ELM has confirmed.

It is expected that both programmes and their technologies will ultimately be merged, with the present BXC contract expected to expire on 1 March 2027.

By then, ELM expects that BXC will have installed 12 000 more electricity smart meters and 5 000 smart water meters.

But in the interim Emfuleni will de facto have two smart meter programmes – BXC with its own unique water and electricity smart meters and then the vast bulk of remaining pre-paid meters (such as Hexing meters) which Vodacom expects to convert into smart meters.

Vodacom is a service provider for the National Treasury which has made membership of its Eskom debt relief programme dependent on the installation of smart meters by municipalities such as ELM.

However, ELM said it had already taken steps to incorporate both BXC and Vodacom into a unified management system to deal with expected, teething, installation and backroom IT technology issues.