The City of Plano, Texas, is deploying temporary workers to manually read approximately 88,000 water meters after a botched firmware update rendered over 73,000 electronic transmission units inoperable, effectively dismantling a smart metering network that cost taxpayers more than $10 million.
A Firmware Fix That Broke the System
The failure does not stem from the water meters themselves but from the transmission hardware designed to wirelessly relay consumption data to the city’s billing systems. In 2019, Plano entered a contract valued at nearly $10.2 million with Core & Main LP, a national infrastructure products distributor, to supply meter transmission units manufactured by Aclara Technologies, a subsidiary of Hubbell Incorporated. The contract, which later grew to $10.6 million by 2021, covered the deployment of Aclara’s STAR Network transmission units across the city’s water system.
The devices were marketed with 20-year lithium battery lifespans and secure licensed-frequency radio communication. However, premature battery depletion surfaced as early as fall 2023, with some units failing to transmit data despite being just a few years old. After a year-long investigation into the root cause, the vendor issued a software patch in November 2024. That update proved defective, disabling more than 73,000 of the city’s roughly 87,000 transmission units, a failure rate of approximately 90%.
Emergency Budget and Manual Workarounds
On February 10, 2025, the Plano City Council approved emergency funding totaling $765,000 to hire temporary staff through a McKinney-based staffing agency. The allocation breaks down to $345,000 for the current fiscal year and $420,000 for the following year. All funds are drawn from the city’s water and sewer department budget, and officials have stated that resident water bills should not be directly affected by the failure.
The city has contracted 15 additional meter readers who will visit each connection individually to record consumption data. Plano officials have emphasized that the readings taken manually match those that would have been transmitted electronically, ensuring billing accuracy remains intact. The timeline for restoring full automated functionality remains uncertain, as all failed transmission units will need physical replacement.
A Pattern of Failures Across North America
Plano is not an isolated case. The same Aclara transmission technology has caused comparable disruptions in multiple major cities across the United States and Canada.
In Minneapolis, a $16.5 million contract awarded in 2017 to install 47,000 residential meters and transmission units encountered premature battery failures that forced the city to hire eight dedicated staff members to replace units at a rate of 144 per day. The city has spent roughly $2 million on remediation so far, at a cost of approximately $124 per unit in labor and materials.
Toronto’s experience has been even more severe. The Canadian city’s deployment of Aclara’s technology across approximately 470,000 water connections saw failure rates escalate from an expected 1% annually to between 5,000 and 8,000 units per month. The city negotiated a $5.6 million emergency sole-source contract with Aclara for initial replacement units, with the full cost of remediation still under negotiation. Toronto officials have warned that replacing all affected units will take several years.
New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection, which also works with Aclara for its water metering infrastructure, has been identified among cities using the same technology, though detailed public reporting on failures there remains limited.
Vendor Accountability and Legal Options Under Review
Plano’s city council has signaled it intends to pursue cost recovery from both Core & Main and Aclara. Council Member Shelby Williams confirmed that the city is in active discussions with the vendors about recouping the emergency staffing expenses and broader costs associated with the system failure. The city is also examining its contractual options and considering legal action if a voluntary agreement cannot be reached.
Neither Aclara nor Core & Main has publicly responded to media inquiries about the Plano failure or the broader pattern of transmission unit malfunctions across their customer base.
What This Means for Municipal AMI Investment Decisions
The Plano incident underscores the risks municipalities face when deploying advanced metering infrastructure at scale. While AMI technology promises operational efficiencies, reduced labor costs, and enhanced leak detection, the cascading failures linked to Aclara’s STAR Network raise difficult questions about vendor due diligence, firmware update governance, and long-term lifecycle management.
For a city of Plano’s size, a suburban hub of nearly 290,000 residents in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, reverting to manual meter reading represents both a logistical and financial setback. The situation also raises broader concerns for other Texas cities that have deployed Aclara’s technology, including Austin and Sugar Land, as well as utilities nationwide considering large-scale AMI rollouts.
The case highlights the importance of contractual protections around firmware updates, battery performance guarantees, and clear liability provisions in municipal technology procurement. As smart water metering becomes increasingly central to utility modernization, the consequences of vendor failures extend well beyond individual cities.
