Electric Company Using Power Lines for Data

Snags writes: "The local electric company PPL Utilities is testing a system to send electricity usage readings back to the company over its own power lines. According to a local newspaper article, they are using the TWACS system made by DSCI. I'm just hoping this doesn't interfere with other ideas for sending data over power lines."

Comments

Re:Higher speed for big cities

[ZeLonewolf]

This article gives no indication that signals over power lines could acheive any reasonable amount of bandwidth. Power lines simply aren't designed to carry information, and I'd bet there would have to be a lot of upgrading of the electric company's equipment to enable this sort of thing.

I would compare this technology to that of x10.com's wireless devices, which send very small amounts of data over house power lines. There's a lot of limitations to it... flourescent lights don't work with them, and the lack of shielding on power wiring sometimes causes devices to spontaneously turn on or off. (this happened to me with my bedroom light....it would turn itself on at 3am, very annoying).

When you hit the button to turn on a light, there is about a two-second delay. Considering that the remote is transmitting approximately 12 bits of data (4b house code, 4b device code, control bits), the data rate seems to be on the order of a few bits per second.

I'm assuming the power company is using a similar form of technology for data transfer. By the time (e.g. years down the road) a system could be set up to transfer a reasonable amount of data over a power line, access to cable/dsl/wireless internet should be advanced and widespread enough such that trying to transmit over power lines shouldn't even be worth the effort.

Of course....the concept of sending data where data shouldn't go is still pretty damn cool... 8-)