Woodruff Electric Cooperative’s (Woodruff’s) advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) project deployed 14,900 two-way communicating smart meters to all of its residential customers and select commercial customers. The communications infrastructure includes a meter communications network using power line carrier (PLC) technology between the meters and substations and an Internet protocol-based fiber backhaul between the substations and the AMI head-end system. Woodruff has enabled remote connect/disconnect and tamper detection functionality through the AMI system. The project’s primary purpose was to reduce operating costs to forestall rate increases. By deploying AMI technology to gain operational efficiencies Woodruff could eliminate field trips for routine distribution system service work and start/stop service requests. The utility also expected to gain improvements in system reliability through improved data acquisition and analytics.