Wirepas takes RF mesh into the Himalayas for smart metering rollout

Finnish connectivity company's mesh technology now sits inside 700,000 smart meters in Himachal Pradesh.

Shimla/New Delhi, October 19, 2026: Himachal Pradesh is a state built on extremes. Tucked into the Western Himalayas, it stacks high peaks against deep valleys and fast rivers, with villages strung along mountainsides and towns packed tight into whatever flat land the terrain allows. For a smart electricity meter, that means two very different problems at once: long distances between meters in the hills, and high density inside the towns. Wirepas, the Finnish company whose RF mesh technology connects more than 12 million smart meters across India, now sits inside 700,000 of them in Himachal Pradesh, and the network is holding its service levels across both.

A state moving fast. As per the Ministry of Power's data as on 31 December 2025, 28,00,945 consumer smart meters have been sanctioned for Himachal Pradesh under the Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme (RDSS), with 7,02,046 installed. That is a sharp climb from 1,74,360 installed as on 4 March 2025, as per the Ministry's reply in the Rajya Sabha, meaning the state's installed base grew roughly four times in nine months. With the scheme period running to March 2028, as per the Ministry of Power's reply in the Lok Sabha in July 2025, the pace matters.

In most of India, the smart metering challenge is scale. In Himachal Pradesh, it is geography. Cellular coverage thins out in the valleys and behind ridgelines. Running dedicated communication infrastructure up every hillside is slow and expensive. And in the towns, meters sit in basements and stairwells where signals struggle.

Wirepas takes a different route. In a Wirepas Mesh network, every meter is both a transmitter and a receiver. Meters talk to each other, route readings around obstacles and outages, and extend coverage with every new meter that joins. There is no central hub and no single point of failure, so a network that loses one link simply finds another. The deployment needs no dedicated gateways and no SIM cards, which means no tower to build and no subscription to pay.

For utilities, Wirepas Certified, the company's connectivity platform, supports both RF only meters and dual communication meters that combine mesh with cellular. That allows a single plan to cover dense towns with mesh and remote stretches with cellular backed connectivity, reducing complexity before the first meter is installed. Existing deployments with the Wirepas platform reach a 99.9 percent service level.

"Himachal Pradesh is the kind of deployment that tells you quickly whether a technology was designed for India or merely adapted to it," 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 crowded stairwell in a hill town, and both need to report on time, every time. Our mesh was built for exactly that range. Extreme terrain, long distances and high densities are not exceptions for us. They are the design brief."

Smart metering is central to the government's effort to make distribution utilities financially sustainable. As per the Ministry of Power, national Aggregate Technical and Commercial losses have fallen from 21.91 percent in FY21 to 15.04 percent in FY25, and the scheme aims to bring them to between 12 and 15 percent. For a mountain state, every meter that reports reliably is a meter that does not need a lineman to climb to it, a bill that does not need to be estimated, and a reading that can be trusted.

Wirepas has worked in India since 2018 with a growing ecosystem of Indian meter manufacturers and AMI solution providers on the Wirepas Certified platform, which is built on the open NR+ standard, the world's first non-cellular 5G standard for massive IoT, and complies with India's IS 15959 DLMS requirements. India is Wirepas's largest market worldwide, and Himachal Pradesh is one of several states, alongside Assam, Uttar Pradesh and Ladakh, where its networks are now operating at scale.