The Finnish connectivity company’s network technology is now deep within 700,000 smart meters in Himachal Pradesh, providing service-level commitments in some of India’s most demanding regions.
Himachal Pradesh is a state built to extremes. Tucked into the Western Himalayas, it piles high peaks against deep valleys and swift rivers, with villages strung along the mountains and cities packed tight into whatever flat land the terrain allows. For smart electricity meters, this means two very different problems at once: long distances between meters in the hills, and high density in the city. Wirepas, a Finnish company whose RF mesh technology connects more than 12 million smart meters in India, now has 700,000 in Himachal Pradesh, and the network holds service levels in both directions.
A fast moving country. According to Ministry of Labor data as on December 31, 2025, 28,00,945 consumer smart meters have been implemented for Himachal Pradesh under the Revised Distribution Sector Scheme (RDSS), of which 7,02,046 have been installed. This is a sharp climb from the 1,74,360 installed as of March 4, 2025, according to the Ministry’s reply in the Rajya Sabha, meaning the installed base in the country has grown roughly four-fold in nine months. With the scheme period up to March 2028, according to the Power Minister’s reply in the Lok Sabha in July 2025, the move is important.
Why the terrain is the real test
In most of India, the challenge of smart metering is scale. In Himachal Pradesh, it is geography. Cellular coverage is thin out in valleys and behind ridgelines. Running a dedicated communications infrastructure on each mountainside is slow and expensive. And in cities, the meter sits in the basement and stairs where the signal is.
Wirepas took another path. In the Wirepas Mesh network, each meter is a transmitter and a receiver. Meters talk to each other, read routes around obstacles and outages, and extend their coverage with each new meter that joins. There is no central hub and no point of failure, so a network that loses one link simply finds another. The deployment requires no special gateways and no SIM cards, meaning no towers to be built and no subscriptions to pay.
For utilities, Wirepas Certified, the company’s connectivity platform, supports RF-only meters and dual communication meters that combine mesh with cellular. That allows a single plan to cover dense cities with mesh and long distances with cellular-powered connectivity, reducing complexity before the first meters are installed. The existing deployment with the Wirepas platform reached a service level of 99.9 percent.
“Himachal Pradesh is the kind of spread that tells us very quickly whether the technology was designed for India or just adapted,” said Ashish Sahay, Sales Director and Country Manager, India at Wirepas. “You have a meter in a village at the top of a valley and another in a busy stairwell in a hill town, and both have to report on time, every time. Our mesh is built to be precise.
What does it mean for the box
Smart metering is central to the government’s efforts to make distribution utilities financially sustainable. According to the Ministry of Power, the national Aggregate Technical and Commercial losses have come down from 21.91 percent in FY21 to 15.04 percent in FY25, and the scheme is targeting between 12 and 15 percent. For mountain countries, every meter that reports is reliable is a meter that does not require a lineman to climb, a bill that does not need to be estimated, and a reliable reading.
Wirepas has been working in India since 2018 with a growing ecosystem of Indian meter manufacturers and AMI solution providers on the Wirepas Certified platform, built on the open NR+ standard, a world first. non-cellular 5G standard for massive IoTand complies with the requirements of IS 15959 DLMS India. India is The largest Wirepas market in the worldand Himachal Pradesh is one of the few states, besides Assam, Uttar Pradesh and Ladakh, where its network is currently operating at scale.