About NEW meters, I know (by experience) that the new electrical meters installed in Italy can be remote controlled (using some kind of signal over the power line) allowing the Utility Company to:
-read your meter, and bill you according to the (optional) tariff that changes day/night and workdays/weekends
-reduce the tripping current of the meter (if you forgot to pay a bill, the max power available will be reduced from 3.5 kVA to 0.5 kVA for (I believe) 15 days, then to ZERO ).
Now they changed my GAS meter with a new one than can do the same things. It uses some kind of Wi-Fi (with some problems because most meters are installed in metal enclosures) and will allow for remote reading the meter and remote cutting off the gas supply.
Cutting the gas supply to a defaulting customer required physical access to the meter, that in old buildings is many times inside the house, and this created problems to the field technicians. Now the supplier can do this from their control room...