Making things worse, the city is also replacing its 23,000 other mechanical meters with electronic ones.
These companies have already carved 15percentt out of Pitney's one-time monopoly in mechanical meters.
The Associated Press reports that as many as 8,500 service stations across the country are still using old-fashioned gas pumps with mechanical meters, which don't register $4 and, in some cases, total sales of $100 or above.
Although the implementation of smart grids offers technical and social advantages, the smart meters deployed in smart grids are susceptible to more attacks and network intrusions by energy thieves as compared to conventional mechanical meters.
The Postal Service is insisting that mechanical meters be phased out in favor of more fraud-resistant digital meters, opening the field wide for digitally savvy competitors like Neopost, Francotyp-Postalia A.G. of Germany and Ascom Hasler Mailing Systems, an American subsidiary of Ascom Holding A.G. of Switzerland.
More than a decade after the last Checker cab was taken out of service in New York City, a small collection of the unmistakably boxy yellow cars, complete with mechanical meters, rate information decals and left-side steering wheels are now seen on the streets of London.
The investor-owned utilities in the state, with the blessing of regulators, are methodically removing all of the old mechanical meters, and replacing them with computerized versions that measure usage every few minutes, and allow for two-way communication between customers and providers.
They thought this was innovation par excellence, and indeed it was, replacing mechanical metering.
To get the new technology into the market quickly, Runyon wants electronic meters to replace all mechanical meters by March 1999.
