By GEORGE KYRALA
Los Alamos

In the article published this morning in the Los Alamos Daily Post (link) about the installation of an Advanced Metering Infrastructure, DPU mentioned “Rather than sending data in monthly increments required under IPRA, DPU may be required to send data in 15- and 60-minute increments to the IPRA request”.

This is a ridiculous method to invade an owner’s privacy and should have been discussed and disclosed before implementation or approval.

A foul player can then easily investigate if an owner is home or not, and can plan to invade the home, steal or cause mayhem by just requesting repeated IPRA.

It was not clear from the article what measures the DPU will take to protect the user from such abuse.

Why not allow the meters to locally couple to the owner’s home network to monitor the meters locally, but not connect to the DPU servers except monthly.

This allows the user to monitor their own usage locally without broadcasting the data. It has the advantage of not using storage memory at DPU, nor filling the network with constantly streaming data packets; thus reducing storage memory and network usage, and saving some funds that our county freely expenses!