Comcast and $VPN_PROVIDER have a vested interest in staying in business, so they will gladly hand over the data to the friendly neighbourhood intelligence agency when requested.
Agree, personally though $agency isn’t part of my threat model while my ISP most certainly is. I would even pay a premium if they offered similar privacy controls as a VPN, but they’d be publicly admitting to shenanigans that most of their customers are blissfully ignorant of!
I recently had my smart meter installed, the actual meters (and the display) themselves connect over a Home Area Network (HAN) and a separate module attached to the electricity meter connects to the mobile network to push readings.
Speaking to the installer, he said that it's common in the north of England for meters to use radio comms instead of mobile network due to the poor reception, I imagine these are unaffected.
It might be more due to the weird way that the government divided responsibility for the metering connectivity. Arqiva have the northern segment and O2 the southern, so they use the method that best suits their existing infrastructure.
Similar to why Google's latest image generator refuses to produce a correct image of a 'Realistic, historically accurate, Medieval English King'. They have guard rails and system prompts set up to force the output of the generator with the company's values, or else someone would produce Nazi propaganda or worse. It (for some reason) would be attributed to Google and their AI, rather than the user who found the magic prompt words.
I have completely ditched Windows for Gentoo/Arch, I cannot stand the crapware installed by default and all the hoops you have to jump through to get rid of it.
