A meter that holds a balance: the household pays first, and supply stops when the credit runs out, without anyone deciding to disconnect it.
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A prepaid meter reverses the usual order of a utility bill. The customer buys credit — at a kiosk, by phone, or on a card — and the meter itself counts it down, cutting supply when the balance reaches zero. No meter reader calls, no bill arrives, and no official signs a disconnection order.
For utilities that could never reliably bill a large part of their customer base, this is transformative. Angola's distributor began a 1.26-million-meter rollout in 2024 against a baseline in which roughly 80% of residential customers were unmetered; Medellin's city-owned utility sells water in advance through a card read at the meter, reaching 30,538 households by the end of 2024, often ones with arrears or informal connections.
The same mechanism is the criticism. Supply ends automatically, so a household that cannot afford credit is disconnected by arithmetic rather than by a decision anyone has to justify — a tradeoff the adoption figures cannot settle. And a prepaid meter is a billing fix before it is a data system: Accra's regulator summoned the utility over complaints that units drained too fast, and neither side could settle it from data only one of them could read.
Added 2026-08-20 · Part of the growing Smart City Glossary