Kenya Power Reveals When Select Token Meters Will Stop Working
Kenya Power has revealed that some token meters will not work beyond November 24, 2024.
Speaking to journalists in Mombasa, Kenya Power’s Regional Manager for the Coast Region, Phineas Marete, explained that the utility firm is aware that about 70 million STS (Standard Transfer Specification) token meters owned by various people across different countries in the world will stop working unless the software is updated.
As such, Kenya Power has embarked on a nationwide door-to-door campaign to identify such token meters, with the utility firm set to help their owners update them accordingly to allow them to function past the stipulated timeframe.
“We are calling them Token Identifier which we have recently launched and the project is about updating the firmware on some selected meters so they continue vending before the set date which has been put on November 24,” stated Marete.
The issue, according to reports, stems from a date rollover problem.
The challenge in question is almost similar to the Y2K problem experienced in the early computing years caused by the use of two-digit years in computer systems.
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At the time, many computers would interpret “00” as 1900 instead of 2000, leading to errors in data processing and calculations.
However, the rollover problem being experienced with electricity meters, known as token identifier (TID) rollover is slightly different.
The rationale is to ensure that; when customers buy prepaid electricity tokens, they all have unique codes so that they don’t enter the same token into their meters.
The way the earliest designers of electricity token meters chose to work around this is to attach a 20-digit code that you enter into your meter once you complete the purchase.
However, the problem with this is that the meter designers were limited in the number of minutes they could allocate to the token before it became too lengthy and cumbersome for users to input into the meter.
As such the meter designers placed a cap on the minutes that could be designed into a token. STS token meter began functioning on January 1, 1993.
Interestingly, a combined duration of 224 minutes, equivalent to 16,777,216 minutes, could be linked to a token. Counting forward from January 1, 1993, gets you to November 24, 2024.
That is the problem at hand.
Kenya Power Reveals When Select Token Meters Will Stop Working
