utility poles and vibrations
I am not a fan of IoT, but this one caught my fancy. I have several times called the utility company to report an outage. It always surprises me that they don't know where the break is. This would help them, and by extension, me. Also, cannot this kind of network be a great way to locate many other things, like explosions or earth quakes?
I should add that, at least in these parts, power outages are many times caused by a motorist hitting a pole. It takes quite a while to locate the problem. In any case, those stupid smart meters have not proven to be useful in detecting outages (or their location) here. Also, "microphones" aren't necessarily sensitive in the voice, or audible, range.