A new partnership between Thales and Landis+Gyr is putting a number on a problem utilities have been living with for years: smart meters deployed for a decade or more, on connectivity decisions made at install and rarely revisited since. The companies announced that Thales will supply eSIM technology and IoT connectivity management to Landis+Gyr’s smart meter fleets across North America, integrated with Simetric’s enterprise orchestration layer.
What the Partnership Actually Does
The arrangement lets utilities provision, modify, and manage network connectivity over the air, across SIM and eSIM-enabled meters alike, without a truck roll every time a network requirement changes. That matters because smart meters don’t get swapped out on a software refresh cycle. They stay in the field for ten, fifteen, twenty years, long enough for carrier footprints, network standards, and regulatory requirements to shift more than once underneath them.
The technology follows GSMA’s SGP.32 eSIM specification, the current standard for remote device management and interoperability across the IoT ecosystem, the same standard Simetric leads with across its own smart metering and eSIM lifecycle work. Thales brings connectivity across more than 450 mobile network operators and 200 OEMs to the partnership. Landis+Gyr brings scale: more than 2,000 utility customers and 180 million connected devices worldwide, according to the companies’ announcement.
Why Simetric’s Role Matters Here
Thales VP Nicolas Bouverot put it directly: “Together with Simetric, we help utilities move from simply managing connectivity to intelligently orchestrating it.” It’s the distinction Simetric was built around. Connectivity management keeps a device online. Orchestration governs what happens across an entire fleet when something changes, and Simetric already does it at scale: roughly 80 million SIMs across 300+ mobile network operator integrations and 1,200+ normalized APIs.
Landis+Gyr SVP Roque Martin framed the business problem the same way utilities have described it for years: “Our collaboration with Thales helps solve that challenge by giving utilities the flexibility to adapt connectivity over time.” A smart meter fleet locked into a single carrier or a single connectivity model at install is a fleet that inherits every limitation of that original decision for the rest of its service life. Remote, standards-based provisioning is what breaks that lock-in. Carrier portals manage connectivity one network at a time. Simetric is the platform that orchestrates it across all of them.
Why This Matters for Utilities Specifically
Smart metering has the sharpest version of a problem most of Simetric’s industries deal with in some form: assets with decades-long lifespans, deployed at a scale where a truck roll to fix a connectivity issue is a real operational cost, not a minor inconvenience. North American smart electricity meter deployments are projected to grow from 152.4 million in 2024 to 180.9 million by 2030, per the companies’ announcement, and every one of those meters will eventually face the same question this partnership is built to answer: what happens when the network a device was provisioned for isn’t the right network anymore.
That’s the same case Simetric makes on its own smart metering work: provisioning decisions made once, at scale, shouldn’t become fixed constraints for the life of the asset. Seeing Thales describe the category the same way, in their own words, in a joint announcement with one of the largest meter manufacturers in the world, is the kind of outside validation that’s harder to manufacture than it is to earn.
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See how the Thales partnership fits into Simetric Validated eSIM Orchestration more broadly. Then schedule a demo to talk through what remote, standards-based provisioning could mean for your own meter fleet.
Source: Thales and Landis+Gyr Enable Smarter, Remotely Managed Connectivity for Smart Meter Fleets, Business Wire, September 30, 2026.