Utility company has installed water and heating meters that are using LoraWAN to remotely send data to them.
I am not sure if I can read the data using Lora protocol too?
I am a little with W-Mbus is transmitting ‘to anybody who listens’ but my utilities company has indicated that their lora network is private and I do not know enough about Lora to know if they are lying or not then they say that it is impossible for me listen to it. (It is not malicious lying… it just easier to say ‘no’ instead of ‘don’t know’ or explain why)
I saw a lot of posts on here about people creating their own networks where they control both transmitter and recover, so this not the case.
The answer is NO on the LoRaWAN part.
All LoRaWAN traffic is protected using two session keys (which are generated in the JOIN procedure). Each payload is encrypted by AES-CTR and carries a frame counter (to avoid packet replay) and a Message Integrity Code (MIC) computed with AES-CMAC (to avoid packet tampering).
Unless the utility company allows you to access their decrypted payloads via an API you’re out of luck.
But most of these utility meters have local IEC 62056 interfaces which can be read optically or serial (BT). I would say that is your best chance.
I got excited reading marketing material to see that the device had wMbus that I already use for some meters only to figure out that is an ‘optional addon’ that the meter I got has no indication of having it 
However it looks to have both Optical M-Bus interfaces, so… it is not plug and play but it should be possible to get the data off it.
Yeah - it’s unfortunate that you need another device + probe to be able to read locally. 
Meter manufacturer told me that their Lora signal is not encrypted! I am going to try and catch it.
There are a lot of noise in 868 Mhz band and I have iM871A-USB which I am not sure if works as software defined radio, so even if the signal is there and readable I may not be able to catch it with it.
Looks like a proprietary LoRa implementation then, rather than standard LoRaWAN.
Interesting! Doesn’t make me feel good about these systems though 
Yah it increases motivation to at least try to have somewhat independently gathered data…
On the meter page they have LoraWAN ‘certified’ logo but in service and technical docs I do not see a single mention of it.
I also found a forum post on that says
I have removed the AES key field and have been able to get another join request
Which maybe an indication that ‘we don’t encrypt’ is correct.
On one hand it is terrible on other I may be able to read my meter’s data… yay?!
I live in the Italy and my new water meter is an Itron equipped with Cyble 5 v1.4 module that allows for wireless remote meter readings. Any possibility to read them?