No — filings in this corpus peaked in 2018 at 46 and have declined steadily since, reaching an estimated 5 in 2026. Some of the drop in the most recent one to two years is an artefact of publication lag, since filings typically take around 18 months to appear in the public record. But the multi-year decline from the 2018 peak through the 2022 midpoint of 23 predates that lag and reflects a genuine slowdown in new filing activity, consistent with a claim space where the core ground has already been staked out.

H04L, covering digital information transmission, is the single largest subclass in this dataset at 449 records, ahead of H04W wireless networks at 270 and G01D measuring and recording at 237. This means claim density is heaviest in how meter data is transmitted and processed, not in the sensing or metrology function itself. Anyone drafting new claims in this space should search H04L and H04W art as closely as G01D art, since the communications layer is where most prior art sits.

The corpus's recent-year momentum data shows named leaders such as Itron, Cisco, Silver Spring Networks and Trilliant Networks all recorded zero filings in the latest reporting year, several down 100% year over year. This does not necessarily mean these companies have exited the space — it is consistent with the broader industry-wide filing slowdown and possibly with publication lag understating the newest filings. It does mean recent activity should be checked directly against each company's current filing behaviour rather than assumed from older portfolio size.

Branches adjacent to the dense communications and measurement core — such as edge-based meter data pre-processing, self-healing mesh reconfiguration, tamper-event root-cause classification, power-line carrier fault localisation, and firmware rollback logic for over-the-air updates — carry comparatively lighter claim density in this dataset than the core H04L, H04W and G01D subclasses. These are reasonable areas to search more closely before assuming a claim is blocked, though a lighter density in this corpus is not a guarantee of a clear path; a full clearance search is still required.

EP2487946B1, granted to General Electric in 2015, claims a method for configuring a wireless-enabled device over an AMI network, where a first device receives information about available wireless access points from one network and receives separate configuration information from a second device over a second network to complete the connection. Work that configures a metering endpoint's wireless connection using a single network path, or that does not rely on a distinct second device supplying configuration data, sits outside the literal claim as summarised here. Anyone building remote wireless configuration for metering endpoints should read the full granted claim set rather than rely on the abstract, since the two-network, two-device structure is the specific mechanism at issue.