reliable communication at a much lower cost since dedicated telephone lines radio or other similar infrastructure does not need to be in place additionally the present disclosure provides much more connectivity between devices enables simultaneous updates from the entire system and provides increased efficiency as no serial daisy chains are used as shown in fig5 an alternative embodiment of the present disclosure provides a method for interoperable communications between a power meter and a plurality of applications using several industry standard communications protocols the method of the present embodiment begins with step 501 wherein a data packet is received by an ethernet card 14 fig2 installed in a power meter e g iemd 10 the ethernet card 14 strips the ethernet protocol wrapper from the data packet in step 502 proceeding to step 503 the packet is inspected to determine which secondary communications protocol is being used e g modbus dnp etc if the data packet is using the modbus protocol the method proceeds to step 504 wherein the data packet is sent to the host device in this case the power meter 10 in the power meter 10 the data packet is parsed and a response is prepared using the modbus protocol in step 505 the response packet is forwarded to the ethernet card 14 an ethernet wrapper is appended and the wrapped response packet is transmitted over a connected ethernet network 16 in step 506 the method then loops back to step 501 to await receipt of the.