Electric Plug 14Mbps Spec Agreed On

Tei'ehm Teuw writes: "From this article on EDTN the effort to establish a standard for power-line-based home networking will take a step forward this week when the HomePlug Alliance announces it will adapt technology from Intellon Corporation for its specification. The 36-member alliance will release a complete specification based on Intellon's technology, with its 14-Mbit/second raw data rate. In Europe, meanwhile, the HomePlug Alliance has established formal liaisons with two groups working on power line home networking: the European Telecommunication Standards Institute and the International Powerline Communications Forum. Neither has defined a technology to date, but it would be possible for them to adopt the same technology as the HomePlug Alliance, even though the European power line access technology is different there than in the United States. (The European power line delivers 220 volts at 50 Hertz; in the United States, it's 110 V at 60 Hz.) The overall forecast for power-line-based home networks is now beyond the 32 million nodes initally projected."

Comments

The *real* application of this stuff....

[DG]

Technical and security challenges aside for the moment, the really killer app for this technology is the seamless networking of otherwise non-networkable appliances.

Not everybody wants an ethernet jack on their toaster, but _everything_ has a power jack.

Imagine the following:

- buy a new VCR/DVD Player/Alarm clock? Plug it into the wall, and watch it set the time on itself to the same time as all the other devices in the house.

- Self-monitoring appliances that are syslog() capable (or something similar) and report faults to a central logging facility

- Appliances that export network APIs to provide scriptable control

...and a host of other Really Neat Stuff possible if you have a standardized network in every home.

Does this mean...

[Stskeeps]

That I can make my own personal organic echelon by plugging my fingers into the electric sockets? ;)

HOME networking

[Signal 11]

'tis important that people note this is for home networking, not for general distribution between an ISP and your home.

The reason that an ISP->user connection will never be feasible across powerlines is due to transformers - the moment you put a signal through a transformer you get garbage out the other end.. that's the downside of transformers - and why you can't use load coils with xDSL. The second problem I see with this is that because of the high voltages involved, it is quite possible to kill yourself.. well, the voltages don't kill, but use alittle ohms law and you'll figure out why high voltages are a problem (for reference, your body is about a 1.5k resistor and your max safe current is 5mA with lethal at 30mA).. anyway.

I also think the technology will be limited SOLELY to the home market - if I was IT manager I wouldn't let my company even *think* about deploying it.. you have all kinds of nasty things in commercial/industrial settings on those wires that just make it totally unreliable - a blown circuit breaker takes out your network, phase shift from flipping on the refridgerator, all those flourescent lights severely throw the phase out of whack - you're left with anything *but* clean energy in a commercial setting.. this is why power strips are so VERY VERY VERY VERY important.. and UPS' on anything worth a damn.

So, uhh, don't expect this to be any kind of "long term" tech - it'll be around for about 10 years tops.. most new buildings these days have cat5 and coax drops just per default.

Re:HOME networking

[panda]

Ok, thanks for correcting my analogy. I had a suspicion that I migh have had it backwards.

You said, "If they are wet and grounded."

Yeah, if you're grounded you're in deep trouble. A guy I used to work with has this bumper sticker: "Electricians' kids are never grounded."
Yeah, I did electrical work to pay my way through college. I don't have a degree in physics but I know enough about electricity to be safe.

As for the wet part, isn't it the salt(s) in water that conducts electricity? I recall doing some labs in high school physics class that showed that distilled water makes a lousy conductor. Of course, water loves to dissolve salts, so your distilled water quickly becomes "contaminated" and a good conductor if you do something silly, like stick your hand in it. Again, correct me if I'm wrong.

Re:HOME networking

[panda]

Remember, it's not the volts, nor the amps that kill you. It's the two together. It's basically the wattage, or the amount or work (ie heat) done by the current. You can survive quite a lot of volts if the amperage is extremely low, just as a relatively small number of volts would kill if the amperage is really high. Compare it to water, and think of volts as volume and amps as velocity. That's generally how I visualize it.

Other than clearing up something that might be a bit confusing, I agree with pretty much everything the previous poster said.

Re:HOME networking

[mistered]

Actually, it is the amps that kills you.

Here's a link.

The reason you don't get hurt by a 9V battery (which, in fact, can deliver quite a healthy current) is because of Ohm's law. The resistance from one of your hands across your heart to the other is quite high. I just grabbed my multimeter and see about 1.5M Ohms, so the max. current that would flow from a 9V battery through me is 6 microamps, even though the battery will probably deliver at least an amp into a short circuit.

Random Thoughts

[HomerQPeabody]

1. Inari (formerly Intelogis) has been shipping a 350 Kbps powerline networking kit for 2 years. You can purchase it at Fry's, Office Max, CompUSA etc. It works in about 80% of the outlets in an average home. There are GPL'd Linux drivers for it on SourceForge. It's good for no more than about 10 nodes. It uses encryption to keep your neighbors from sniffing your data. Sure it is slow, but it's faster than your dial up connection.
2. 14 Mbps is really impressive on a power line. (Lots of reflections, lots of noise, dynamic line conditions). I wonder if it really runs that fast? Has anyone seen a demo?
3. Intel's home networking product is a phone line product based on the HomePNA (Home phone network association) spec.
4. Wireless is still more expensive than powerline and it has its own set of problems.

Media Fusion Gets Around Transformers (They Claim)

[johnlenin1]

They look promising in this area. Peep this article for more info.

Could a DOS attack cause an explosion?

[dustpuppy]

Image if someone performed a Denial Of Service (DOS) attack via a powerline-based network?

All those ping packets of x volts combined - boom!

:)

Re:Similar thing trialled in the UK..

[Ed Avis]

The voltage is still 240V in Britain and 220V on the Continent. The new European 'standard' is 230V, but with a wide enough tolerance to cover both. See this page.