About 700,000 smart electricity meters in Himachal Pradesh, a mountain state in northern India, now send their readings over radio mesh technology from Wirepas, the Finnish connectivity company said on 20 October 2026. The meters are already installed, and the company says the network is meeting its service targets in remote villages and crowded towns alike.
Himachal Pradesh sits in the western Himalayas, between the plains of Punjab and India’s border with the Tibet region of China. About 6.9 million people lived there at the 2011 census, many in villages spread across steep valleys, and like most Indian states it has its own state-owned electricity utility.
In a mesh, each meter passes data to its neighbours until it reaches a collection point, so readings can hop around a ridge or out of a basement. Wirepas, based in Tampere, Finland, works with Indian meter makers and metering service companies, which build its connectivity platform into their meters.
Ashish Sahay, the company’s sales director and country manager for India, said the state shows quickly whether a technology was designed for India or “merely adapted to it”. He contrasted a meter in a village at the top of a valley with one in a crowded hill-town stairwell, saying both have to report on time. “Extreme terrain, long distances and high densities are not exceptions for us. They are the design brief,” he said.
Valleys, Ridges And Basements
Homes in Himachal Pradesh are spread thinly across mountain slopes in the countryside but crowded together in towns such as Shimla, the state capital, where flat land is scarce. Wirepas says phone signals weaken in deep valleys and on the far side of ridges, and that meters fitted in basements and stairwells often struggle to connect.
Its answer is to let the meters do the relaying, so the network grows stronger as installation continues. For homes too far apart for that, the company says its platform also supports meters that carry a cellular link alongside the mesh radio, so one plan can cover both packed towns and remote stretches.
Himachal Passes 1M Smart Meters
By 31 December 2025, Himachal Pradesh had installed 702,046 of the 2.8M consumer smart meters sanctioned for it under the Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme (RDSS), Ministry of Power figures show. Launched in July 2021, RDSS is the national programme that funds smart meters and network upgrades for state electricity utilities.
Wirepas’s 700,000 figure sits close to that whole end-of-year count, though its announcement does not say how or when the number was measured. It also does not name the utility, the meter makers or the contractors behind the Himachal Pradesh meters.
The state has kept installing since then. Counting meters on transformers and power feeders as well as on homes and shops, it had 1,006,060 installed out of 2.84M sanctioned by 30 June 2026. That figure comes from a written ministry reply in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India’s parliament.
A Slow Start For The State Board
Himachal Pradesh State Electricity Board Limited (HPSEBL), the state-owned utility that supplies power across the state, began installing 151,740 smart meters in Shimla and Dharamshala in mid-2021. L&T, whose role has since passed to Schneider Electric India, was chosen to install them, with PFC Consulting managing the project, the utility says.
In 2023, HPSEBL cancelled its smart-meter tenders under RDSS, saying the bidders had not met the standard bidding criteria and had quoted rates that were too high. Its employees’ union had already urged the chief minister to review the smart-meter plan, warning that it would deepen the board’s money troubles.
Apraava Energy now holds three HPSEBL contracts as an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) service provider, meaning it installs the meters and runs the systems that read them. Its project list puts the Shimla, Hamirpur and Kangra–Mandi contracts at about 2.9M meters in total. Apraava appeared on a list of Indian companies Wirepas said it worked with in 2024. Neither company has said publicly whether the Himachal Pradesh meters run on Wirepas’s mesh.
Built On A Non-Cellular 5G Standard
Wirepas says its certified platform, the version Indian meter makers and AMI providers work with, rests on NR+, a radio standard to which it says it is a key contributor. Also called DECT-2020 NR, it comes from the same standards family as Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT), the technology behind cordless phones. The company adds that the platform meets IS 15959, the Indian standard for how electricity meters exchange data.
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) calls it the world’s first non-cellular 5G standard, meaning it needs no mobile operator or cell towers. The International Telecommunication Union’s radio sector accepted it into its 5G family in October 2021. Every device can act as a router, and the network reroutes itself when one drops out, ETSI says.
India Is Wirepas’s Largest Market
India is Wirepas’s biggest market, and the company says its technology now connects more than 12M smart meters there, out of over 20M devices worldwide. It has worked in the country since 2018, by its own account, and in 2024 it put its Indian count at 4.2M meters.
Himachal Pradesh joins Assam, Ladakh and Uttar Pradesh among the places where Wirepas says its networks run at scale. In rural Uttar Pradesh, the most populous of them, its mesh already carries readings across spread-out villages.
Across India, 57.3M meters had been installed under RDSS by 30 June 2026, the same Rajya Sabha reply shows. The scheme is set to end on 31 March 2028, and states still have most of their sanctioned meters to fit before then.
The ministry ties the programme to lower Aggregate Technical and Commercial (AT&C) losses, the share of power lost in the wires or never billed and paid for. Those losses fell from 21.91% in the 2020-21 financial year to 15.04% in 2024-25, by its count.
Rollout Runs To March 2028
Wirepas now counts Himachal Pradesh among its large Indian networks, with its mesh carrying readings from mountain villages and crowded hill towns. The meter count is the company’s own, and its announcement leaves the utility, meter makers and service providers behind those meters unnamed.
The state has passed 1M installed smart meters but still has most of its sanctioned total to fit before the national scheme ends. Those remaining meters face the same mix of remote valleys and dense towns that Wirepas calls its design brief.
