Finnish wireless mesh networks provider Wirepas has crossed 12 million smart electricity meters connected in India. According to Wirepas, this positions the company as the country’s most widely adopted provider of dedicated smart meter connectivity with a 20 percent market share.

India has become the cornerstone of Wirepas’ global growth. Today, more smart meters run on Wirepas connectivity in India than in the rest of the world combined, making the country not just its largest market but the proving ground for connectivity at a large scale, Wirepas said.

This is significant for India, whose power distribution sector has long carried a heavy burden of losses, from electricity that leaks out of ageing infrastructure to revenue that never reaches the utilities that generated it, Wirepas maintained. The government of India’s revamped distribution sector scheme was designed to change that, with smart metering at its core, and this is where those 12 million connected meters go to work every day.

For households, a connected smart meter means billing based on actual consumption– rather than estimates—with visibility into daily usage, and the convenience of prepaid electricity where consumers control their own spending. For utilities, it means continuous, accurate, tamper evident data that helps cut distribution losses, detect outages faster, plan demand better and recover revenue that once slipped through the cracks.

And for the country, every reliably connected meter is a building block of a modern grid, one that can absorb growing volumes of renewable energy, balance supply and demand in real time, and deliver power more efficiently to a nation whose electricity needs are only rising. Because the data these networks carry never stops flowing, they are quietly becoming part of India’s digital public infrastructure, invisible by design, essential by function.

Wirepas said it takes a different approach to connectivity. In a Wirepas RF mesh network, the meters themselves form the network. Every meter acts as both a transmitter and a receiver, so there are no gateways to install, no SIM cards inside, and no dependence on cellular coverage that thins out exactly where India needs metering most. The network is designed to heal itself when connections drop and grows stronger with every meter added, delivering data reliably from dense urban high rises to remote rural villages, backed by a guaranteed 99.9 percent SLA.

That architecture is also what prepares utilities for what comes next. As India’s AMI ecosystem matures beyond meter reading toward grid flexibility, distributed energy resources, electric vehicle charging and other data intensive applications, utilities will need infrastructure that remains interoperable across vendors and adaptable over decades. Built on the principles of the NR+ standard and designed around open interfaces, Wirepas designed its RF mesh network to enable utilities to expand and evolve their networks without vendor lock-in, protecting investments made today while supporting tomorrow’s grid services.

“Twelve million is not just our milestone, it is India’s,’’ said Teppo Hemiä, CEO of Wirepas. “Behind every one of those meters is a household getting fairer billing, a utility cutting its losses and a grid learning to respond to demand in real time. India is the toughest testbed imaginable for IoT, dense, diverse and dynamic, and it has made our technology better.”

Hemiä went on to say that 12 million connected meters demonstrate that open, standards-based connectivity can operate at a national scale. “As India’s grid becomes more dynamic, interoperability and long-term flexibility become just as important as reliability. We believe the next chapter is about building infrastructure that utilities can continue to evolve for decades.”