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Standard Transfer Specification The STS was created over 25 Years ago in South Africa, as an industry standard to support the Eskom mission of "Electricity for all" and its electrification programme to connect 10 million households to the electrical supply grid by making use of prepayment metering technology. The STS Association was founded and became the custodian of the STS technology in 1997, which was then published by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) as IEC 62055-41 and IEC 62055-51 as open international standards for prepayment meters. The STS Technology was founded in South Africa and has been in use for over 25 years in the prepayment market. It has been globally deployed and internationally recognized by approximately 170 manufacturers, has demonstrated its use for over 970 utilities worldwide, supporting more than 800 certified metering products in 100 countries.
In keeping with the rapidly progressing technology, The STS Association is continuously working on standards enhancement projects.
Working Groups, comprising technical experts from The STS Association member organizations and the industry are currently involved in a number of projects related to the ongoing maintenance of the standards, as well as new developments such as the enhancement to the encryption key management system and the harmonisation of the STS into the DLMS/COSEM protocols to allow STS to be used in the Smart Meter markets.
There are currently approximately 170 members from 36 countries, almost all of which are manufacturing STS compliant products.
TID Rollover Event – 24 November 2024
The STSA estimates that approximately seventy million prepayment meters are currently installed globally. These meters will need to be reset before 24 November 2024 as the system that creates the credit tokens will run out of numbers at this time and all existing meters will stop accepting credit tokens.
The STS Association urges all ALL USERS OF STS PREPAYMENT TECHNOLOGY to commence their TID Rollover Projects immediately.
Don Taylor, Director of STS Association, explains:
“The token identifier (TID) is calculated as the number of minutes that have elapsed since a defined base date of 1993 up to the time of creating the token. The TID has a limited range and will run out on 24 November 2024, when all prepayment meters based on the STS technology will stop dispensing electricity, thus presenting a significant risk to the service levels of all sub-metering vendors to end-user customers in the electricity, water and gas utilities business.
Each credit token has a unique token identifier (TID) encoded into the 20 digits to prevent token replay at the meter. The TID is referenced to a base date of 1993 and will run out of range in 2024 (known as the TID Rollover event), thus causing the prepayment meter to stop accepting new tokens. The technical remedy is to “reset” each meter to reference a new base date of 2014 by means of entering two (2) special tokens before November 2024. This requires substantial time, effort and resource loading, on the part of the sub-metering vendor, so it is imperative that the remedial action process commences as a matter of urgency.”
There is now only a 4 year window, within which the utilities have to complete this programme and because the STSA is concerned that utilities may leave this too late, they embarked on an awareness program that has been running for a few years, by reaching out to all STS users and providing a platform that will facilitate technical support and guidance to users during the implementation of the TID rollover programme.
In an effort to continue the awareness drive of the 2024 TID Rollover event, the STSA established a dedicated Website – www.tidrollover,co.za - that houses detailed guidelines for every step of the TID Rollover process and reference documents. To further enhance communication, Training Videos & Pilot programmes are available on the STS YouTube Channel.
Don Taylor adds:
“We estimate there are approximately 70 million meters that are currently installed globally, which will definitely be affected by the rollover. If utilities are sufficiently proactive, then it is possible that all new meters being installed can be manufactured on the new base date of 2014, thus avoiding the 2024 event for these newly installed meters. It could well be that approximately 70 million meters in total will be affected between now and 2024. We therefore urge the industry to upgrade to STS Edition 2 immediately, start manufacturing new meters on the 2014 base date and to commence the TID rollover programme as soon as possible.”
Since the second quarter of 2020, the STS Association has also embarked on a communication drive to deliver Critical Notifications to every user of the STS technology globally.
The communication is specifically targeted at Municipalities, Utilities, Prepaid Meter Manufacturers and Sub Vendors. The notifications were sent to stakeholders in all affected sectors in SA, English Speaking International countries and went a step further to translate the communication into several foreign languages e.g. Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and French for countries whose primary language is not English.
For additional support, The STS Association is testing sample meters (those certified prior 2014) upon request and free of charge. Arrangements can be made by sending an email to franco.p@mweb.co.za or tid@sts.org.za or via the chat bot on the website - https://www.tidrollover.com
TID Rollover ~ The Time is Now!
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