The real danger of "smart meters"

There is a lot of hype and hysteria about the smart meters the electrical companies have been rolling out, however there is a very real problem and not a lot of people know about it and SCE has done its best to keep it quiet.  To set this up, I had a friend who was telling me how the smart meters would fry your brain, cause cancer, etc., so in the interest of calming her, I did some research and found that they work on the same frequency as items like baby monitors and cordless phones, so no problem there, however....

At the same time as I was researching this, I had started having a problem with all my wireless devices in my house, laptops, iphones, android phones, tablets, etc., that they kept loosing their wireless connection and I'd have to turn them off and turn them back on again (the wifi, the not he device).  In my research I saw other people complain of the same thing, so I had SCE come out with a manager, an electrical engineer and a smart meter expert.  We stood by the meter with an android phone and an iPhone, neither could connect to the wifi.  They unplugged the meter and both could now connect to wifi, I said "that seems to indicate a problem" and the smartmeter expert said "that doesn't prove anything", so they plugged it back in, and both devices lost connectivity, again the smartmeter expert said it proved nothing.  They left, and I was not satisfied.

A couple days later the manager who had been to my house calls me, off hours, from a personal phone, and tells me he's been doing some research and there is in fact a problem with the devices, but SCE refused to acknowledge it publicly because it was a massive problem for them.  He told me there are two wireless devices in the unit, one "phones home" once or twice an hour, this one is not the problem.  The other is a Zigbee device, and it pings off about every 30 seconds.  Think of the Zigbee as kind of super bluetooth.  These smart meters work as a mesh network, they beam data to each other around the neighborhood till the get to the transmitter meter that sends it off over the cellular network, the house with the giant smart meter is the transmitter.

Now, think of the wifi and zigbee signals as notes on a piano, wifi is the white keys and zigbee is the black keys.  Each note is a "channel", so while you might not be on the same channel, it is close enough that it causes disruption.  By default most home wifi routers are 2.4ghz and on channel 6 or 9.  If you are on 5.2ghz, then you won't have a problem, but 5.2 has less range.  The zigbee stomps all over channel 6 in particular.  Basically, if you change the channel on your wifi router to 1 or 11, it moves the signal out of the way of the zigbee and pretty much clears up the problem.  

I have a nifty app for my android phone called "wifi analyzer" and it will show you all the wifi signals it is picking up, their strength and channel.  Even the customer support people at SCE don't know about this, I've explained it to a few and every one of them commented about how they'd started having this problem and realized it was the same time the smart meter went in.

This is an easy fix, but you need to know how to get in to your router settings from your web browser.