Editor’s note: A digital route to the past

Editor’s note: A digital route to the past
By Peter Whitehead, Digital Business editor

Published: June 16 2010 01:02 | Last updated: June 16 2010 01:02

My teenage daughters were recently given an idea of what “smart metering” could mean to them. Smart meters will soon be in many homes, showing inhabitants how much energy they are using and encouraging them to consume less.

The girls were surprised to see what a difference just switching on a kettle could make. But the technology they were seeing for the first time is many decades old – a coin-operated electricity meter, with the wheel that indicates power usage in a highly visible spot in the kitchen of a holiday apartment.

For the first time, they showed an interest in what was switched on and began to see a connection between energy use and the dwindling pile of coins on the window sill.

Smart meters will make this relationship far clearer and more user-friendly. But in essence, this amazing digital technology is merely recreating a connection that will be very familiar to anyone who has ever fed real money into a meter.

Of course, smart meters will also enable new services to emerge, such as flexible payments, whereas the benefits of another digital technology – DAB radio – over traditional analogue are far harder to identify.

I invested in an expensive Pure DAB radio three years ago and still enjoy many of its advanced features, such as the ability to record programmes. Less enjoyable is its insatiable demand for batteries – it has become so costly to feed that it now has to remain attached to the mains in the bedroom.

It also suffers from “all-or-nothing” tuning, so that only stations with strong signals can be received. This is a digital technology that has much to prove before it can be deemed fit to replace existing analogue services.

Digital technology is certainly changing the world – but perhaps not always as fundamentally or as effectively as we might think.

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