Thales and Landis+Gyr have agreed to put remotely managed eSIMs into smart meters across North America, using the GSMA standard written for devices nobody can reach. The two companies announced the collaboration on 30 September, with Thales supplying eSIM technology built to the SGP.32 specification, Landis+Gyr building it into its Revelo and Surent metering platforms, and the American firm Simetric providing the console utilities use to manage the connections.
The practical effect is that a utility can change the mobile operator behind a single meter or an entire fleet without sending anyone into the field.
Landis+Gyr is the larger name in the arrangement for most readers. The Swiss company supplies more than 2,000 utilities worldwide and counts about 180M connected devices, which makes it one of the few vendors whose decisions move the metering market on their own. Thales, the French group, sells the secure elements and provisioning systems underneath, while Simetric runs a connectivity management platform that pulls several operators and technologies into one view, work it also does for AT&T.
"Our collaboration helps solve challenges by giving utilities flexibility to adapt connectivity over time without swapping hardware," said Roque Martin, senior vice president for connected platforms at Landis+Gyr. Nicolas Bouverot, who runs mobile connectivity solutions at Thales, described the aim as helping utilities "move from managing connectivity to intelligently orchestrating it."
Meters Are eSIM's Hardest Case
A smart meter is close to the worst possible environment for a SIM card. It sits in a locked cabinet, a basement or on a pole, often behind a utility's own access procedures, with no screen and no one to tap it. And it is expected to work for fifteen to twenty years, which is longer than most mobile network generations survive.
That combination is why a technician visit usually costs more than the radio inside the meter. Sending someone to a few hundred thousand addresses to change a SIM is not a project a utility undertakes willingly, and regulators rarely let them pass the cost through without argument.
SGP.32 exists because the earlier standards assumed circumstances meters do not have. The machine-to-machine specification depends on SMS, which narrowband devices often cannot use, and the consumer specification assumes a phone with a screen and a person holding it.
The networks have been the forcing function. Operators across North America have switched off 2G and 3G, and meters installed on those networks have had to be visited, replaced or bridged, which is an expensive lesson utilities have already paid for once and the same question that runs through every network switch-off.
A Replacement Cycle, Not A Rollout
The timing matters more than the technology, because the region is in the middle of a replacement cycle rather than a rollout. Berg Insight put North American smart electricity meter penetration above 82% as far back as 2024, with the installed base growing from 152.4M that year to 180.9M by 2030, a compound rate of 2.9% that reads as maintenance rather than expansion.
Shipments tell the same story more sharply. Annual volumes peaked at 18.4M units in 2024 and are expected to decline to 12.0M by 2030, with second-generation meters making up roughly three quarters of what ships by the end of the decade. The United States is forecast to reach 91% penetration by 2030 and Canada 97%.
So the meters being installed now are mostly replacing first-generation units bought a decade ago, many of which were stranded by a network change. A utility choosing hardware this year is choosing what it will still be running in the 2040s, which is precisely when the connectivity question bites.
That is the commercial argument underneath the announcement, and it is a reasonable one. It is also easy to overstate, since an eSIM only protects against operator and network changes, not against a meter whose processor, memory or metering standard has aged out.
Thales Is Collecting SGP.32 Deals
This is one of several arrangements the company has assembled around the standard this year. Thales has worked with AT&T on an SGP.32 platform, with the Bridge Alliance on multi-operator orchestration across Asia-Pacific, and with the test house COMPRION on a test bed for the specification.
The wider field moved at the same time. Telenor IoT began commercial SGP.32 deliveries in April, emnify launched programmable SGP.32 in March, Tele2 IoT demonstrated an end-to-end deployment with IDEMIA and Cisco, Eseye added it to its platform in April and Soracom reached general availability in July. The GSMA published version 1.3 of the specification in May, while version 1.2 remains the baseline for formal certification.
Against that, the differentiator is no longer supporting the standard. It is who runs the management layer, which is the contest over the provisioning system that has shaped most of this year's eSIM announcements. In this arrangement that layer belongs to Simetric, with Thales supplying the secure elements and Landis+Gyr owning the customer relationship, so a utility gains freedom to change mobile operator and takes on a dependency on the console through which it exercises that freedom.
Adoption of the standard itself is still early. ABI Research counted 2.89M SGP.32 profile downloads in 2025 and projects 194M by 2029, with the sharp climb arriving from 2027, which means the installed base remains overwhelmingly the older specifications for some years yet.
A Fifteen-Year Decision Made This Year
What Landis+Gyr and Thales are selling is insurance against the specific failure that has already cost North American utilities money once. Meters outlived their networks, and somebody had to drive to each one.
Whether the insurance pays depends on things neither company controls. The eSIM has to still be manageable in 2040, the console has to still exist, and the operators have to keep supporting profile changes on devices generating a few megabytes a year at low margin.
What can be observed now is narrower and more certain. A utility ordering meters in 2026 is making a connectivity decision that outlasts several network generations, and for the first time the standard exists to make that decision reversible without a site visit.
