4. Conclusion

Clearly, electricity metering and its billing and customer service applications have reached a significant level of sophistication, thanks to the technical advances generated by integrated electronics and computing. Electricity metering, a tiny economic field, has benefited from the immense progress made in microcomputing and cell phones.

This raises the question of whether, apart from the reduction in hardware costs and a certain degree of miniaturization - the latter being reduced, for metering, by the need for an interface with the power grid - we haven't reached a limit as far as the development of electricity metering hardware is concerned. Another constraint is the major need for excellent reliability, which slows down the introduction of mechanical devices, such as hard disks, into electricity meters.

However, if there's one area...