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Comment by philk | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather someone was deterring Telstra from levying such exorbitant charges in the first place than wasting my tax dollars locking someone up for such a minor crime.

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Exactly.

Assuming she had downloads running non-stop during the 4 months, at a maximum of 7 mbps (3g), she would have downloaded 8859 GB. With a $193000 bill, the "significant theft" was Telestra charging $22 per GB.

I'm getting very different numbers... I may be wrong though?

(7,000,000/8) = 875,000 bytes/s = 0.834 MB/s

0.834 * 60 * 60 * 24 = 72,057 MB/day

(EDIT: Tweaked numbers, had mistyped 0.834 as 0.844 — doesn't affect the point)

Your number looks the same, 72GB/day = 8,859GB over 4 months.

Right, sorry.

Someone else looked up Telstra pricing and got an estimate of 90GB.

http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile/plans/phone_plan.html

They charge more like $2/MB. Sadly, Australia absolutely sucks in terms of internet access costs.

I am sure the power company is far happier paying $22 per GB than $20 per month per meter.

I don't understand what's "minor" about this crime.

If theft of meter SIM cards became endemic, the utility and the MNO would have to spend millions or even tens of millions of dollars to deploy countermeasures. That spend is entirely deadweight loss that exists solely to mitigate bad actors.

Not subverting your power meter seems like a pretty reasonable clause in the social contract that enables us all to have (extraordinarily) cheap and convenient electrical power.

It would have cost them far less if they had the foresight to consider the chances of it happening, or at least try and arrange it with Telstra, who's more than capable of doing so in a way that would mitigate abuse from the service?

How? How would it have cost them less? That seems like a good question to answer preemptively if you're going to make that argument. And, while you answer it, keep a running tally in your head of roughly how much it would cost in (1) legal fees and (2) delayed deployment (which has a cost you can break out in $/hour based on continued needless truck rolls as only one example) to negotiate that with the MNO.

When you're finished, weigh that cost against the benefit of reducing the legal fees for criminals who steal service from your meters.

>How? How would it have cost them less?

They could have arranged with Telstra to cut off service to any meter that billed over $X in a month.

In fact, that should have been an obvious step to make, because a meter that was sending too much data was probably buggy, which could mean the data it was sending was probably worthless. The engineers who failed to include the cutoff were insufficiently paranoid.

What about meter diagnostics? "Cut off" means "cut off"; what if the utility needs the capability of remote snapshotting the memory or current firmware rev of a meter? (Having done multiple smart meter security review projects: this is not a crazy notion).

Yes, fellow geek, there will be some number that represents the maximum amount of bandwidth that might ever be used to diagnose a faulty meter. How much would it cost to figure that out? Again: weigh that against the business benefit of doing so.

The person who abused the meter SIM did not accidentally do so.

Now that this has happened, and both the MNO and the power company are trying to prevent it happening again, that would suggest they are changing the service, and thus the lawyers will be called back in again to amend the service agreement accordingly. Ignoring the costs associated with both the potential extra PR costs in cleaning this up, the costs associated with IT or modification to meters either installed or otherwise, or the costs with the power company's representation during the court case I could imagine that this return visit by the lawyers wouldn't be put onto the MNO's bill entirely, nor would they be getting a discount compared to the smaller amount of time I assume it would take to define the preventative requirements as part of the agreement before it was finalised.

I can only assume that the $22-per-gig plan doesn't actually exist on a consumer level. Instead, this is some bizarre charging agreement which works between Telstra and the electric company, specifically for smart meter applications (which presumably don't send all that much data). Nobody ever bothered to think about what would happen if the SIM were taken out and used elsewhere, though they really should have.

Since the electric company is already out of pocket for the $200K, and since it's not Telstra's fault (and hence Telstra shouldn't have to pay the $200K back either) I guess charging the woman the full $200K as a deterrent (assuming she can afford to pay it) isn't too bad.

It does sound like a pretty harsh sentence, but if she'd gotten away with a slap on the wrist imagine what would happen next -- everyone would be ripping apart their electricity meters to get cheap internet access.

This discussion also strips out everything that complicates the agreements utilities have with MNOs to handle smart metering traffic. These boxes get deployed in massive huge waves, tens of thousands at a time, and require terms of service that are not typical for normal MNO customers.

It's simply not reasonable to compare the rates payed by a utility for always-on reliable backhaul from hundreds of thousands of meters to those payed by a single mobile phone customer for "download web pages" data service.

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