You didn't have a dumb meter with Excel in the Denver area. They weren't "smart" but they weren't dumb. Excel towed a trailer around to read the meter remotely. They still use this "niche" technology rather than purchase smart meters. It's very, very strange...
Nah they never upgraded ours. It was there for the entire 12 years we were in the house, and looked like the original installed around 1968. Ancient stuff. When the snowstorm ripped the thing clean out of the box when the 40x30 awning smashed into it (March 2003 blizzard), the five guy "emergency" crew watched as one of their braver members clambered up on the awning in three feet of snow and peeled away the awning far enough to reach down to the brick porch, pick up the meter, shove it back in the open hole on the box, and put a new "seal" tag on it.
Normally the meter reader dude would leave a card on the back door whenever he read it with little marks on what he saw on the meter dials that you were supposed to check again yourself to see if it looked like he foooooked up. The neighbors usually got a card marked "couldn't read meter ________" and the checkbox marked for "dog in yard".
Unless they were home to let the guy in the backyard they got an estimated bill and she complained to us next door about it all the time.
If anyone happened to be around when we saw the guy walking around the neighborhood we'd go to her side gate and grab her totally friendly golden retriever by the collar and walk it out of the way so the meter guy would read her meter. I did that a number of times while I was mixing work at the office and work from home.
The City of Denver water meters were RF and they'd drive by with some truck and read those. We were not in Denver but we were on the Denver City water system somehow.
We also still had door to door mail service too which is pretty rare these days. We couldn't keep a mail carrier more than about six months. They hated walking the neighborhood.
And they all just walked through the yards, didn't even attempt to stay on paths or sidewalks. A couple of neighbors were peeved that some of them just walked through their flower beds, stepping on whatever was there.
Out here in the Styx, we've got a mail house with all of those nice little cubbies and a bunch of package boxes. If you leave a package more than a day, they'll pull it and take it to the PO 12 miles away for you to pick
up, because there aren't enough package boxes by a long shot.