There was a big drive a few years back to modernize the meters and some of what I suspect are the types that became 5G kills you groups fought long and hard to block these new meters being swapped in.

The kicker is that it's HIGHLY unlikely that those meters were 5G.

It's muuuuch cheaper to get a CAT1 LTE radio module and go 4G WITH the added benefit that 4G has better distance/signal/etc than 5G does at a trade-off of a lower speed.

Where I am in the midwestern U.S., those meters are typically in people's BASEMENTS.

5G would be a a combination of massive overkill for a few megabytes of data a MONTH and non-starter for connectivity reasons because getting bars to a tower through several feet of earth and cinder block is notably harder in the 30gHz+ frequency range when compared to the ~6gHz of 4G (or the 850mHz-2.1gHz of 3G).

These things are streaming text files full of usage data numbers. Netflix-capable connections are wholly unnecessary. Your old 2006 motorola razr flip phone could handle the data these meters are putting out without breaking a sweat.