The Davis Square Community

For the current generation of water meters, many use a short-range radio communication system for reading. The water utility has to have a vehicle or person equipped with appropriate equipment drive or walk near the location where the meter is installed in order to read the meter. I think there also exist meters that contain wireless (telephony) modems and report their readings that way. I don't know which Cambridge uses. The latter type might actually report in daily, the former type probably get read, at most, once every couple weeks. The previous generation of meters required, for reading the meter, the utility to plug a piece of equipment into a socket located usually on the outside of the building and connected to the meter - the socket is almost always in a black rectangular housing with weatherproof cover. Before that, meters were used that required physical access to the meter in order to read.