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Powerline Networks Finally Viable?
Logic Bomb writes: "MIT's Technology Review has an article discussing the current state of digital networking over electrical lines. It sounds like we may be seeing useable electrical-line LANs soon, but this obviously doesn't solve the 'last mile' problem. I remember once reading something about attempts to provide Internet connectivity over the electrical grid; anyone heard anything recently?" This article may be shocking (in a good way) if you assumed that practical powerline networking was still far in the future, and in a bad way if you thought that companies could easily agree on the right standards and methods to accomplish it;)
- has horrible latency
- has an upload cap
- does not provide static IP addresses
- is overpriced
Some of this may change with the introduction of LEO systems, but that is still several years off in the future.It's a good technology, but, unfortunately, it won't have a large market.
There are more of us that still need a viable broadband solution than you suspect.
Clearly you are not entirely kidding, rather you are a visionary and futurist, even if you don't yet know it. Dutchwater (See what happens when you legaize pot? You get a burst of innovation... followed by the munchies.) has already taken this idea to the Internet infrastructure business, so CPE cannot be far behind. (Or would that be CPP, for customer premises plumbing?)
I wrote parts of this stuff
Perhaps what happened over the weekend was that the Slashdot server, having achieved sentience, attempted suicide because it was just so embarrased.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I guess Verizon has been using the CA powergrid for their networking.
The number one saying in American households in the year 2018:
Goddammit who flushed the toilet! My download was almost done.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I wouldn't want just anybody DDOSing my X10 devices.
There was a lot of concern about this years ago when cable TV became widespread. Cable companies have a pretty poor record of performing good quality cable installs. ``Leaky'' connections were supposedly resulting in measurable amounts of RF noise. Even though that noise isn't in the same band as, say, an aircraft's landing system receiver, the added RF energy could generate interesting IM harmonics (either by swamping the receiver's front-end or just through combinations of the various RF signals that the receiver sees) that could affect the receiver's performance.
Something tells me that the power grid is not wired for clean transmission of hig speed data. I, for one, would sure as hell hate to find that I'm augering in because someone's downloading a collection of Metallica MP3s.
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
This sort of thing has been going on for months in California...and here people have been blaming power companies instead. :-)
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Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
They have tried setting up broadband networks over electrical lines, but there is too much cross-talk in the line transformers. They could route around current transformers, but not effectively. (They still "need" the trasformer to do it's job.)
They have a few solutions to this problem, but all of them require enormous infrastructure investments to roll out. (And with less performance that current solutions) In Europe, where more of the power lines are buried, it is wildly unfeasable.
~Hammy
The superior format was VHS, because it initially was able to offer the magical two hours of recording (over Beta's one hour). Beta never recovered from this initial disadvantage (IMO).
h tml
http://www.urbanlegends.com/products/beta_vs_vhs.
BTW, I grew up with Beta (which were very popular in Hawaii), and had to switch to VHS when we moved to California. I also bought an Amiga then, and loved it. But everyone else eventually caught up (mostly)...
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
As I recall, Energis route perfectly ordinary cables alongside on the pylons, working on the grounds that they had space and that that was cheaper than putting up their own poles and digging their own trenches.
Different cables, though - they're not running over the same wires as the national high voltage grid.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Nope. the autopsy reports are consistent with blunt trauma to the cranium ,consistent with a crazed physicist with a hammer wreaking vengance for the cat pissing on his lab notes.
Yeah, this'll cost me some karma.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
More technical info on the HomePlug standard can be found here (3000 words).
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IP over Power Lines has been the holy grail for broadband internet for quite some time. Power lines go everywhere, and there's no need for talk of "the last mile", since a computer is hooked into the power grid, unless you're into making your own power.
The problem has been that the idea never really got off the ground. I think that most people believed that they had a hard time justifying why they could get 2.4 gb/s over high voltage powerlines when DSL could barely get over 2mbps over copper wire. The homeplug standard said they could only get 6mbps and that was over lines internal to the house.
They've had quite a long time already to make it work. I've had a suspicion that if it actually worked as intended, that they would've been in the running for broad band service long ago.
Yeah, now that I've spent literally weeks, running cat5 cable to every nook and cranny of my house, so that I could use my linux firewall, and my cable modem to get access in any room, now you're telling me I coulda just used the existing powerlines, which are ALREADY IN EACH FSCKING ROOM I WANT!?!?
</rant>
On another note, I wonder how reliable this is. I'm already using X10 stuff through my house. And I get very strange continuity problems. There is one switch that I have in my house, that when it's on, the X10 stuff doesn't work on this one light that I have. But when that switch is off, everything works great.
But it's actually not that simple. Sometimes it does work with the switch on. Most of the time it doesn't, but occasionally it does. I have yet to figure out the combination of things that make it work when the switch is on.
I wonder how reliable in home powerline networks are going to be and if you'll end up running into strange problems like this.
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Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
In the US, yes it is. In Europe a single power transformer serves maybe a hundred homes, which can be served by single internet connection.
In the US, only about a half dozen homes are served by a single transformer, meaning you need at least 10 times as much connection equipment.
Power line networking will be limited to the internal home uses in the USA for a long time. There is a lot of room to grow in this area, alot of which will be driven by energy costs, and having applicances communicate, and having them run during off-peak hours.
The X-10 system is a very simple implementation that has been around for years. Works fine for semi reliable lighting control.
in 2 german cities (essen and muelheim/ruhr) rwe (a german electricity company) wants to provide a powerline internet connection already in 1-2 weeks. see http://www.rwe-powerline.de/
it happens that i live in muelheim so i could use powerline if it weren't more expensive than dsl
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
No thanks. The energy crisis in California is bad enough without adding more stress to the lines.
OTOH, if it were set up so I could zap the living shinola out of those stupid 1337 5kR1p7 k1dd135 every time they do something, I'd pay through the nose and just go around taking out my stress on 13-year-olds.
I wonder if e-Lectrocute.com is taken yet...
Zaphod B
Zaphod B
When duplication is outlawed, only outlaws will have
I have done some research into this area for a project at work. The Intellon PowerPacket uses OFDM this modulates the data in the 4.3 MHz to 20.9 MHz band. This is independant of the 60Hz power signal on the line, and at much lower amplitude(voltages). So it means that this will work during the power outages in CA. Also the security is taken care of encypting your info with a 56-bit DES key. This keeps your neighbors from snooping, but not distributed.net or the NSA. Every powerline on the same side of the transformer as you and in transmission range can be connected. It is also independent of the Frequency/Voltage differences in outher countries. Check out HomePlug for the standard wars to come. In essence they have picked the fundamental ideas from Power Packet.
The "radio" portion of a cell phone has a parts cost of about $10 today.
The fight over the best technology is not a bad thing, any more than Linux is a bad thing because Windows already exists. It will drive competition for better technologies, which is a goog thing in such a immature market.
I used to work for a company which makes commercial cable equipment. Most cable companies today that offer broadband use different cable modem technologies, but that is starting to change. Based on all the different technologies in the market, a standard (DOCSIS) was decided upon. Whether modems using that technology are out yet or not, I don't know.
Anyway, incompatible technologies are an importart part of such an immature and unstable industry such as power line broadband.
The "power struggles" among the major companies is a good thing. When a standard comes out, it will be that much better.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Fight Spammers!
*bzzzzzzzzt* *AAAARGHHH!*
Well, the problem is that you have this 50 Hz sinus, and you try to piggyback another signal on the top of it. This signal might need to be in the MHz range. Now, the problem is that if you put a MHz signal in a wire, then you have an antenna. It radiates electromagnetic radiation... And that's bad.
The response has been to keep the amplitude of the MHz signal just above noise, but then you'll loose a lot of packets, and from what I've heard, any signal with sufficient amplitude makes the radiation so bad it interferes with just about everything in the sorroundiings...
There was this test of this stuff about a year ago in Norway. They delivered the packets allright, that's easy enough, and the company proclaimed the test was extremely successful, and that they would roll it out to consumers the following month. That was before they got the bill for jamming all the radio stations around, and the communications inspectorate knocking down their doors telling them to shut up.
Obviously, the technology may have improved, but it doesn't sound they have addressed this. All they're writing is
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
It can be really difficult to explain to a newbie what is needed to hookup a few PC's via ethernet - this would make it much easier - "just plug this USB device into a wall outlet".
I just spent the weekend stringing cable in the attic of a sweltering house, and this seems like a happy alternative. Any idea what speeds it's capable of?
I'm pretty sure the focus of this article isn't really broadband, but about using power outlet networking for a LAN application. i.e. it doesn't bring broadband to your house, it's for hooking your PC in the office to the laptop in the living room.
A consortium of about 90 high-profile technology companies will announce Tuesday that the group has finalized a new standard that will serve as a common way for connecting electronic devices to the Net through electrical outlets.
The HomePlug Powerline Alliance, which includes Cisco Systems, Intel, RadioShack, Motorola and Hewlett-Packard, among others, has spent the past year working on a standard for using homes' internal electrical network to link electronic devices. The new standard is based on technology created by little-known company Intellon.
etc....
It sounds like we may be seeing useable electrical-line LANs soon, but this obviously doesn't solve the 'last mile' problem.
It doesn't solve the first mile problem either. All it works for is LANs.
The problem with using the grid to serve the internet to homes is the transition from transmission lines to distribution lines. The stepdown transformers really muck up data transmission.
At a recent Distribution Automation convention in San Diego, one company touted a technology for using the grid as a WAN. Their stuff wasn't bothered by transformers. The drawback: max speed was 1 bit per second.
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Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
can you imagine a beowulf cluster of refrigerators?
:)
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Now, maybe that's a whole bunch of bunk, but if it's accurate, what effect would this new device have? It surely would "dirty" up your power a bit, not to mention everyone elses on your phase loop.
It is interesting what happens when someone just guesses about what a technology does. Why are you so positive it will "dirty" up the power? What do you know about the technology? Why on earth would 92 companies agree to something that is not going to play nicely with the appliances in people's homes? Seems to me that would be a good way to piss off your customers and invite lawyers to your doorstep with class-action lawsuits.
I'd wager any standard they end up with is going to be "safe" in your house for appliances.
On another note, wouldn't this technology have similar problems as cable modem? If the whole neighborhood signs up, what kind of throughput will you get?
Well, seeing as how this technology is for LAN's, not WAN's, I don't see how this argument applies, at all.
"And like that
I think you're missing the point.
As long as the varied broadband connections do not breed incompatibility, it's definitely a Good Thing (tm)
The more choice the consumer has, the better. The great the variety, the stiffer the competition. The stiffer the competition, the better the service. Finally, we get down to price. Doubtless, with more consumer choice come more competitive pricing schemes.
hahahahaha. I'm laughing mao. This can't, of course, be serious. here:"We've developed a unique client-side nozzle (CSN), which functions just like a conventional modem" heh. And:
Dial-up/ISDN 128 Kbps
Frame relay (T-1) and DSL (copper wire) 1.5 Mbps
DSL (air interfaces) and Ethernet (LAN) 1 Gbps
Optical fiber (OC-192) 9.95 Gbps
Optical fiber (OC-192 with DWDM) 318 Gbps
WaterNet Unlimited
Almost had me fooled, Zigurd. Did you just make that site? How'd you get it registered so fast and, more importantly, why "dutch"?
Oh wait, click "who we are" at the bottom of that page. April fools.
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Okay. So we transmit through the flourescent lights (/. article), which of course doesn't work if you're trying to get some shut-eye or setting up GOOD lighting that bathes your room in light. Now we transmit through the power lines, which doesn't work if you live in California at the wrong time or if you have vacuum cleaners or massive electrovactic flux capacitors or whatever: point is, there's light radiation all over the place, there's power radiation all over the place, hell, there's even radio pollution all over the place (which is why Bluetooth's failing so miserably, as we all know...). But what means of communication do we have that has no parasite devices riding it yet? What magic, wonderful link is there between us and the outside world, over which there is transmited the equivilent of terabytes of raw, reliable data, but which currently isn't at all modulated, although it easily can be made to be, so that rather than what amounts to static today, we get real-live bits?
/that/ today? My roughest calculations show an upper bounds, based on where brownian motion starts to interfere with your data, in excess of 2.82 exobauds of data per household. (The lower bounds, based on the pressure difference that you can modulate not when no water flows through the pipes [and when brownian motion therefore is the only thing screwing you] but rather when everyone turns on every water faucet on full, flushes all their toilets, and opens the fire hydrants outside, /still/ results in good, clean data of about 750kbps, with generous redundancy for error-correction. Either way, lower bounds, upper bounds, that's a good hefty amount of bandwidth).
we need to start sending last-mile data down the water pipes.
Yes, it's true, we have a system that currently can vary in pressure by hundreds of pounds per square inch, that currently has a fairly fixed pressure whose modulations no data-gobbling devices currently utilize, and which services a relatively few number of homes per pipe. Sure, it'll be a shared bandwidth -- or "pipe diameter" -- among all the homes in an area, but then so wasn't broadband cable -- and who's laughing at
Latency? That's estimatable from the speed of sound through water -- since sound is, after all, modulation -- which is "1400 and 1570 m/sec (4593 and 5151 ft/sec). This is roughly 1.5 km/sec (just under 1 mile/sec) or about four times faster than sound travels through air." (Although it "depends on the temperature of the water, its salinity, and the pressure ") Now granted, a second to travel a mile might seem excessive, but bear in mind that, based on the above, the information still travels four times as fast as if you were to yell it. Maybe we can have an asymmetric system, so that you dial in with your modem, and have downloads come through the fat pipe. Okay, enough silliness.
(i'm kidding)
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First of all this isn't a powerline service to deliver data to your house they tried that already in Liverpool but the streetlamps started acting as RF transmitters, the idea was buried.
However, I know a company called Energis uses the high-voltage backbones to transmit data&voice between cities, this service gets nowhere near the local-loop and isn't available to consumers though.
Ok... HomePlug is just an internal thing like X10 or HomePNA for linking appliances etc, say linking your PC to an MP3 box on your hi-fi.
Noise on the phase may well be a problem, and there's the possibility you could sniff your neighbours network, I asume they've done some work with authentification to solve this. People already have this problem with X10, you can fit a filter to your main distribution box that kills any noise in either direction and stops X10 ingress. I have the feeling doing the latter might be beyond your Joe average, I guess they could fit filters to new houses, but new homes will most likely include 'proper' networking like ethernet.
MPLampS - Electricity over IP (with MPLS Control Plane)
This will let us send the electricity you need over the existing IP network...
Bill
I did a presentation on this back in college a few years ago. Doesn't sound like a whole lot has changed. Companies involved all think "their" standard is the best and everyone else should conform to them. Not to mention the first time they tried to roll this, it wasn't ready yet. But thats nothing new. Look at the recordable DVD market for further reference.
I really hope they get this figured out soon. I think the technology is super cool and the speeds are respectable. I recommend everyone to read up on it. You'll be impressed.
He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
While it would be cool to run broadband access over the already existing power lines, that's not what the article was about, nor does anyone suggest that's possible.
In Europe that isn't too bad, since the number of households per transformer is high. In the US on the other hand, the number of households per transformer is very low, hence increasing the cost of using most current powerline modems quite a lot.
FYI: If all you want is sending data over powerlines within your own house, there are cheap, working boxes to be had from lots of places, and I know at least a couple of people who've built powerline modems like that themselves.
I think that the first few h4x0ring attacks against carrier-current (that's what these things are called) home networks are going to make them a lot less popular than focus-group studies might make them appear. The first time some kid shows an animated disemboweling and decapitation of Barney to the obnoxious neighbor's 2-yr-old or flips pr0n images on the TV during the evening news, the stampede will be on for technologies which have some inherent security (like phone-wire). Sure, carrier-current and RF systems can be secured; we just know that security is going to have holes you could sail a supertanker through to make it "convenient" and "easy".
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Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Companies have been doing irresponsible things for years. I don't see why this should be any exception. And yes, anything that transmits signals through your power lines will "dirty" up the power (slightly). In order to get a signal, you have to "vary" something. Your choices are: voltage, current, or AC cycles. The first two have naturally wide variations, so I doubt that either are being used. Frequency has some variation too, but not as bad. The question is, will the effect of the network even be noticeable with the normal "noise" that exists on your power lines. The answer is most likely that it won't be any worse than your neighbor turning on a vacuum cleaner. But the question should still be asked.
Ok, sorry. I was getting a bit ahead and trying to be forward thinking. I should have explained more. Although the article only dealt with home networks, I was envisioning some sort of mini-WANs set up on a phase loop -- any residents on that loop could pay an ISP on the same loop for internet connectivity. Cool idea, but it probably wouldn't work very well anyway.
GreyPoopon
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GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Now, maybe that's a whole bunch of bunk, but if it's accurate, what effect would this new device have? It surely would "dirty" up your power a bit, not to mention everyone elses on your phase loop. Enough of these running, and we'd all have to buy whole-house green plugs for everything EXCEPT the outlet we were using for ethernet.
On another note, wouldn't this technology have similar problems as cable modem? If the whole neighborhood signs up, what kind of throughput will you get? I have to believe that running new power cables (to increase bandwidth) is more expensive than burying some extra fiber.
GreyPoopon
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GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
I assume that I'd still need a router or hub if there are more than 2 machines hooked together over this interface given that it's just a power line ethernet interface, right?
How about a plug strip instead?
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
Radios are expensive? It's been around forever, and they're dirt cheap. During second world war people made radios using a crystal, and some wiring to their amalgam fillings. What a tosser.
Think about this for a second: One of the suggested killer apps for this useless lan technology is supposed to be internet radio. That's right: They want you to get special networking hardware, buy an internet radio and plug it into an electric outlet. The state of the art networks at the moment are 2 mbps, in practice giving 6-700 kbps. Your radio, at 128 kbps, which I think is minimum for decent sound, would consume 20% of the house bandwidth. Does not compute. There's a reason people use the spoon and not the knife when eating soup.
Other applications was to have appliances talk to each other, for example your dvd player and your tv. If they went with wireless, you could instead do most of the stuff through your remote control.
Most over the posters seemed awed by having internet over the powergrid. If they read the article, it's about home networking using the power lines in the house.
Communication over powergrids exists, but the bandwidth is very low, and it is mostly used for signalling for power grid operation. You could get an internet connection that way, but you wouldn't want to call it broadband.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
There was a much smaller model built by Norwegian WWII POW's that used the prisoner's teeth (while still in the mouth of course) as part of the radio, but I can not find a link to that. But it really exists in a museum.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Here are some pages for you:
http://www.domosys.com/
http://www.enikia.com/
http://www.intellon.com/
I think people are just getting excited over the idea of this being adopted by a large power coorporation instead of being only deliverable through specicialized companies.