Itron has about 14 million of its most modern, two-way communicating meters now under contract. But it also has about 67 million older meters in the field that "ping" out signals for drive-by meter reading.

This week at the GridWeek conference in Washington, D.C., the Spokane, Wash.-based meter maker explained how it's seeking to make those two systems more interoperable, both backwards and forwards.

First, backwards. Later this year, Itron will begin to ship two-way OpenWay meters that also contain its older, one-way encoder receiver transmitter (ERT) radios.

Why would anyone want that? Well, think of all the utilities that already have installed, or plan to install, ERT meters. They may not want to strand those assets by rushing to a two-way infrastructure, said Rich Creegan, vice president of sales.

Giving them a meter that can fit into both present one-way and future two-way architectures could allow a utility to stick with the one-way architecture for now, he said. Then, once it's ready to put an OpenWay network into place, those meters will automatically switch over to it, he said.

And of course, those new meters will come with ZigBee radios to communicate with in-home energy management devices, though those are likely years from large-scale deployment (see Green Light post).

Then there's forward compatibility. Last week, Itron announced it was working with OpenPeak to, among other things, link both one-way and two-way meters to the startup's home energy management devices. Those, in turn, could be linked via broadband or cellular networks back to the utility (see Itron Asks OpenPeak to Link Meters).

Itron has already asked home energy management startup Tendril to link up its one-way meters back in February (see Tendril Moves to Link Up Old-School Meters). It also has a deal with demand response aggregator and home energy device maker Comverge to link its meters (see The Elusive Smart Meter-Demand Response Combo).

Now it's rolling out a slew of new partners for linking its meters, including in-home energy device startup EnergyHub. The Brooklyn-based startup is seeking to put its devices into a Consolidated Edison pilot project that's seeking Department of Energy stimulus grants (see EnergyHub Gets Software, Gear Into ConEd Pilot).

Another Itron partner taking data in a different direction is Ambient Corp.. Ambient makes multi-modal communications modules, which sit on the distribution grid, to link smart meters, distribution automation devices and other smart grid systems to utility back offices.

Ambient is also working with Verizon Wireless, which has a pre-existing relationship with Itron (see Green Light post). The cellular carrier is being used by Duke Energy, which has chosen Ambient to link up about 1.5 million meters it wants to deploy (see Ambient Extends Smart Grid Contract With Duke).