A field technician in a Lagos distribution company still climbs several flights of stairs each month to read an analogue meter by torchlight, while three streets away a burst water main has been leaking since Tuesday and nobody at the utility company knows it yet. Both problems share the same root cause: the network cannot…

A municipal engineer in Lagos and a network planner in Manchester are asking the same question this year: why does a “smart” utility upgrade cost three to five times more than the conventional retrofit it replaces? The answer sits in a mix of hardware, integration labour, data infrastructure, and long-term maintenance obligations that rarely appear…