AT&T has struck a deal to provide smart-grid services to Duck River Electric, the fourth largest electric cooperative in the state of Tennessee.

The deal will see AT&T (Dallas, TX, USA) provide a number of smart-grid services to Duck River, including advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), smart grid meter data management and other smart grid applications.

Claiming to serve about 71,000 members, Duck River says it came to AT&T to upgrade its smart grid infrastructure, reduce its operational costs and improve its customer service.

Freeing up airwaves for use by the US wireless industry could spur the take-up of new M2M services, with enormous benefits for consumers and businesses.

That was one of the key messages emerging from today’s keynote presentation at the CTIA Wireless Show in Las Vegas.

Speaking to a packed hall, Steve Largent, the president and chief executive of the CTIA, said his organization was pushing government authorities in Washington on the issue of spectrum availability, describing it as “pivotal” for the mobile industry’s future prospects.

The attitude of US consumers towards smart-grid and smart-meter technology improved over the course of 2012, according to a new survey from Navigant Research.

Utilities have struggled to communicate the benefits of these technologies to consumers, but doing so is critical if smart-grid programs are to succeed in the long term.

According to Navigant, however, last year there was a noticeable increase in favorable attitudes towards the concept of the smart grid in general and smart meters in particular.

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Asia’s burgeoning smart-grid market is expected to generate $15.83 billion in revenue in 2018, up from just $5.4 billion in 2012, as demand response and energy management systems grow in popularity.

The forecast comes from Frost & Sullivan, which also believes that “Southeast Asia’s desire to switch to smart grids” will fuel smart-grid sales over the next six years.

The market-research company says Asia’s smart-grid market has already been given a huge boost from the rollouts of advanced metering infrastructure in Australasia and smart city projects in North Asia.

UK authorities have extended the deadline for installing smart meters in homes and businesses throughout the country, and delayed the start of the program by a year.

Utility companies were originally expected to have finished installing smart meters in the UK’s 30 million homes by the end of 2019, but will now have until the end of 2020 to complete the rollout.

Moreover, the £11.7 billion ($17.9 billion) program is now scheduled to start in the autumn of 2015 instead of the summer of next year.

M2M specialist Telit says one of its new modules has won the approval of Sprint for use on the operator’s US cellular network.

Telit (London, UK) says the new CE910-DUAL cellular M2M module is ideal for embedded applications requiring easy integration, but also suited to platforms based on Windows and Linux operating systems.

The manufacturer reckons it is particularly appropriate for applications such as vending, tracking, smart metering and telematics.