By Tara Seals

I have to admit, I still guffaw when someone puts the words “smart” and “metering” together. That’s because here in Northampton, Mass., the parking meter maids have set new standards of cleverness, like lurking by about-to-run-out parking meters in order to be in position to write a ticket the second the thing switches over to red. That seems monstrously unfair – after all, the parking ticket game centers on the luck of the draw. You might be running late, but the meter guy might be sweeping a different parking lot.

The era of wiggle room, ladies and gents, is soon to be over. That’s because 4G and HSPA-based 3G, helped along by the federal stimulus program, are the perfect delivery vehicles for a new era of government applications that will, among other things, automatically issue your sorry self a ticket when your time’s up, regardless of whether a maid happens to be there or not.

These telemetry types of apps were the focus of the municipal mesh Wi-Fi craze a few years back, which promised cities the use of networks for all kinds of efficiency-bolstering machine-to-machine (M2M) goodness, from fuel gauge monitoring to remote enablement of video cameras. But muni wireless of course crashed and burned in a brilliant blaze of failed business modeling (it’s hard to make money with a free service that doesn’t reach enough people to be monetizable with ads). Now, the cellular networks are getting better and faster, making the need for a mesh overlay potentially obsolete in the future. Cities got a little taste back then – and now, with the recession, want to go on a full-on M2M bender.

Utilities, too. The term “smart metering” most often applies to smart grid technologies, which use information from networked appliances in the home and from various types of power plants in the utility’s footprint to make smarter decisions about how much power to deliver to a household and how to better manage power sources – eliminating waste and being greener in the process. It’s an effort that venture capitalists and the Department of Energy alike will be making investments in, and many of the applications rely on wireless to transmit the appropriate information – which all needs to be crunched and analyzed in a central location in order for a smart grid to work.

So anyway, I probably won’t be chuckling over “smart meters” for much longer. And I’ll have to learn to not play so fast and loose with the parking meter time (a ticket can go from $10 to $50 in the space of 30 days here. And I, of course, always forget to pay it, so I end up with the $50. Uggghhhh).

P.S. Sorry about the headline. Really. I don’t know what got into me.