Well, that was fun... or not.
In August I eventually got a date for an installation of a new shiny SMETS2 smart meter, that can cope with me having solar PV. The date was Tuesday 12th November, and they kept sending me phone messages twice a week since August, reminding me of the installation date, including one sent the day before the installation.
Well, do you think I now have a smart meter, it being the 16th of November? Of course I bloody haven't, because they found a new way to screw up.
Apparently the mobile phone signal isn't reliable enough without a 5 metre high aerial which they don't want to provide. Actually where the meter is, there is a fairly consistent Vodafone signal, but of course they use EE. So why did they only realise this the morning of the appointment? The head of customer services insists its because they do repeated phone signal checks (how, without actually visiting my house?) right up the the installation time.
They say I will probably have to wait a year or so to see if the phone signal improves, but as the phone companies seem hellbent on providing 5G to city dwellers who already have pretty damn fast 4G, rather than actually providing a phone network that serves the whole UK, I'm not holding my breath.
So why didn't the smart metering standard cover communication in rural areas, particularly as my area has full fibre broadband (paid for by the welsh Govt and the EU, NOT bloody BT/Openretch).
I'm not giving up on this, but Ofgem are a bunch of wasters who don't actually want to do their job, and refuse to speak to common members of the public (it was hard enough dealing with them at work). This reinforces my view that the mobile phone companies should be legally prevented from installing ANY 5G infrastructure until they have finished providing a basic mobile signal to the entire UK. If OFGEM would talk to OFCOM, and both of them would actually do the job of serving the people of the country, I might get somewhere.
The fight goes on...