Slashdot Mirror
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."
Boy, I can't wait for the first time I can take a tcpdump of my electrical wiring in to dispute my bill...
:)
And how about a DDOS attack? Do I have to firewall off my toaster now?
This would be a great way to bring high speed Internet connections to cities with large populations. By high speed I mean higher speed than current Cable/DSL connections. This would take us a step closer to being able to pipe audio/tv signals over the Internet.
~.Evanrude
this idea has the potential (get it?) to make a short in your network card a little more hazardous. This is a BOFH moment waiting to happen.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
A proposal to use power lines in the UK for data transmission was dropped because of a number of difficulties, most notably the fact that HF radio (about 2MHz to 30MHz) would have been rendered unusable in urban areas. Street lamps made great quarter-wave antennas.
Now I'll be able to send a hojillion volts down the wire to those 5kr1p7 k1dd13 1337 h4x0r5 that keep DDoS'ing me off of Efnet. Well, I hope.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
In ohio, they are doing this in several place,
In a small town (where I work) they have pretty progrewssive ideas on power and communications,
First they have community power, almost 1/2 the cost of Ohio Edison in the next town over. Second is community cable, once again much cheaper, third is cable internet access, $20 a month compared to Time Warners, which you can still get here,
NOW about a year ago Wadsworth put FIBER to every home in wadsworth, long term plans include long distance. AND the ability to selcetivly shut down electical stuff on peak demand, (just your air conditioner, etc) to avoid brownout, because of the above reasons , and one of the best public school systems in the country, population is exploding.
Wadsworth is a great town and I lived there during my high school years, BUT If i lived here again an axe and cutters would hit that fiber so fast it'd make your head spin. Shutting down services on your panel selectivly MY ASS.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
I read in this article (Wired magazine... not on the web), the total corporate history and research of this project idea.
Basically, big ass companies like AT&T etc.. did a lot of testing and decided that it was just too expensive to offer net over the powerlines. The main problem was that although one could effectively transmit data over the powerline.. once it hits a transformer the data is lost, and the only solution that 3 big companies could come up with was a device installed on each transformer to carry the signal, which is completely uneconomical and defeats the whole purpose of using the existing powergrid.
There is even a big scandal with another company that claimed they could overcome this problem.. and it turned out to be a total fake, and lawsuits galore occured.
Of course there is no problem with using the powerlines in your house to network... so Rock on Lan parties!
The communication uses the zero crossings of the 60Hz waveform--same as X-10. Last thing I'd want is my lights turning on and off when they do meter readings.
bp
Many power companies have fiber up on the high voltage towers - which generally terminate in metro areas and rural areas at power stations - they use it now mostly for substation monitoring and internal networking. However, given the bandwidth potential of this fiber - they've got the ultimate backbone available. They just need to get that last mile figured out - no easy task!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
HydroQuebec, in the provinde of Quebec (duh!) tried this a few years ago (circa '97).
At the time, there were a number of obstacles that made this technology unworkable. If I remember correctly it had something to do with electromagnetic field sensitivity. The earth's EM and solar flares made the whole system too error prone, at the time.
This brings up another memory. A company, 10 years ago, had a cheap office wiring system that used the ground outlet as a network transport. With their adapter, any machine plugged (quite literally) was on the same network.
What made that idea (and company, I think) fold was the lack of security. Anyone could connect to your house's power outlet and get connected. Furthermore, there were no filtering devices that served as "firewall" between your house and the external power grid.
Like I need lag on my power, and lets not forget the script kiddies, this gives "ping of death" a whole new meaning.
"Hey I wanna watch tv!"
"Well, we have to wait until 3AM when every sane person is sleeping so we can have enough power..."
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
TWACS currently reads at 300bps. There's technology out there that will up that, but it isn't going to get anywhere near what's needed for a decent Internet connection anytime soon.
My husband has been working with DCSI for about 2 years on the system in NE WI and there have been a few issues with interference, but not with homes and shit. The pulses aren't strong enough to interfere with normal shit, though there was one incident of a substation - which sends time synch pulses out to individual meters - setting off the railroad crossing alarms every 15 minutes.
It's a better solution than using RF to transmit the readings back to the sub - most of those are using 900MHz to transmi and you can imagine what kind of problems THAT causes.
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
Our competitor got their hands slapped pretty bad by the public utility commission for that one and had to eat the entire investment. There was just no justification for such fancy toys to handle such a low-tech task.
sPh
I'm just hoping this doesn't interfere with other ideas for sending data over power lines.
Trust me, it will. The model will be developed first as a way to read meters, and second (maybe) as a way to provide internet access. EVERYONE needs electricity, only some people can't live without high speed internet. The power company will implement it's meter reading first, and maybe, if you're lucky, implement a web access service, but you can bet that if it interferes at all with power or meter reading, it'll be cut as fast as they can cut it.
~ now you know
IIRC from my tour of a substation years ago, electricity suppliers use power line carriers (PLC) to communicate between substations to relay switching information. If you happend to be driving by a substation, look for these large cylinders called wave or line traps, that are used to "capture" the RF signals...Cool stuff especially since they are operating on something like a 500kV line. Probably a much simpler modulation scheme though.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
The high speed data over mains, as they are testing in the netherlands, has been shown to create massive disruption to radio services. It would take a real lot of money to bribe (lobby) the FCC/congress to allow this in the US, money which would be hard to raise considering the dismal state of the telecom industry.
The service indicated here seems appropriate for telemetry. I wonder if they have accounted for security in control situations though. It may be too easy for someone to forge a packet. Still, at 300 baud (or what that bps?) its interference problems maybe be far less.
I suspect taht the major cost of providing wired Internet access is the rights-of-way. I don't think that routing data around transformers, even at a cost of a few hundred dollars per transformer, would be a big deal in comparison. Those transformers probably require more maintenance than that over a few years.
We canned the idea for Internet, but this application sounds ideal; low bandwidth, low contention (presumably), and if it goes wrong, you can always send the legacy meter readers around in a van... Or you could upgrade all your kit, I wonder which one they'll opt for...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
This has been done for a number of years (~20) by several companies, most notably GE.
My company, Cannon Technologies (www.cannontech.com), is also a supplier of Distribution Line Carrier systems, and has been doing it longer than TWACS.
I'm actually programming protocols for several power line carrier meters.
0x0D 0x0A
There's very little in common. TWACS works by doing phase-shift modulation on the 60Hz carrier; this is a wonderfully robust method when implemented correctly, but at best you get a bandwidth of a few tens of bits per second. This is great for reading power meters (where a few bits per hour is plenty of bandwidth) but it has nothing to do with high-speed internet connections.
I was outside the house the other day and noticed that my electric coop had installed a new meter. Upon closer inspection I noticed a little red light on the meter. Curiousity was peaked so I called up a friend of my that works for the coop and he went into a long explaination about these new meters they are rolling out. He called them Turtle meters and a quick net search turned up http://www.turtletech.com/Products-Sales/standardt urtle.htm
To quote their website
It monitors kilowatt-hours and records peak and minimum demand. The data is time-stamped and is continuously transmitted across the utility's own power lines. As long as the meter has power, the Turtle transmitter can provide a count of short outages (blinks) and establish whether the transmitter is in power fail.
The Standard Turtle transmitter can be programmed to return one of eight different data transmission options. The time needed to transmit a complete packet varies from 13.9 to 27.2 hours depending on the amount of data being transmitted.
Which falls in line with my friend telling me that it can take a day to get a reading because they are using a super low frequency. So yeah, they can remotely read meters. But they have definite problems with lightning. My friend spends a lot of his time in the summer replacing the Turtle units in the meters because they fry very easily he says. But they are cheap enough that it is still cheaper than sending a meter reader to all the houses.
Hunt says they've been doing this since 1995, so its not new, but few people have seen it because it has taken a while to get them out.
During the dot bomb bubble, I heard about a company that had a high-speed method of data transfer along power lines. They "inscribed" the data in the magnetic field around the power lines.
The problem with this is and other high-speed data ideas is that when you are sending data across copper wire you must increase your modulation frequency to acommodate more data. That works great until you get to a power transformer and it scrubs the harmonics (and your corresponding data).
I guess fiber is the only long term solution until quantum data transmission becomes a reality.
-ted
I think my local power company (FPL) is using a two way version of this for their ON CALL system. This lets them brown out selected appliances in your house (such as your water heater or Air Conditioner) for brief periods during high power demand. You tell them which appliances you will let them control and they install a special box between them and the power line. They only brown 'em out for brief periods (I forget what the max power cycling periods are). For this you get a lower rate on your power bill. Makes sense for some people.
That's exactly the point of the article... they are going to transmit data over the powerlines. It's a done deal.
Apparently they've overcome the transformer problem.
I live in Reykjavík Iceland, and the power company here has already implemented internet over powerlines, although only a few people are using it now it seems to work just fine.
I guess we can use this technology because the entire population is about 280.000 people (and about 260.000 of them use the internet) check out Fjöltengi even though most of you wont understand a word of that page, you can check out the pic of a chick using the magical-gadget on the main page.
Hitler's in the fridge.
Yes, they have been doing that for quite a while. I looked at the board design for a meter like that maybe 8 years ago, although finally the job of producing them went to the Tampa plant, since the customer was a Florida utility...
And this is redundant, but dozens of idiots still haven't got the message: It's NOT an internet connection. It's not even a 300bps teletype connection! Power lines are not built to carry signals -- but you can sort of make it work if you send just a few bits per second, with lots of error detection and correction coding, and ask for a repeat whenever a switch flips somewhere and drowns out a packet.
Yeah, the data rate is quite slow. I just got back from the lab where I was reading 13 byte data chunks from a meter via DLC/PLC - each message took about 3 seconds to send, including header and CRC info.
:)
Definitely not on par with my cable modem.
0x0D 0x0A
...they are using the TWACS system made by DSCI.
Inside sources report that this service will be followed shortly by delivery of high-speed Internet access over the power-lines, using the TWATS system made by DVDA. Offering 10 times the speed of Cable or DSL providers, power companies expect to be THE providers of streaming Internet video within 5 years.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Me to! No way I'm going to let them use this new IP over 480V to stop power to my house! Soon as I see them put a kill switch onto my compressor, I walk out back and axe that line. Oh wait.
OK OK, I'll have to figure out how to fake out the black box. Sooner or later, they will make a black box that can't be fooled and throw you in jail for trying.
These brown out intiatives are pure evil. Let the freaking power companies build new plants, people! They have been telling you about impending shortages for 20 years. The bad economics of the early to mid 80's then the 90's and some power saving devices helped forstall the crunch, but you can't expect that to last forever. We can have boxes or we can just make more power for ourselves and keep things nice cheap and regulated.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
There are some utilities out there who fought like crazy to retain the "old, outmoded dinosaur" model. Those that came closest to succeeding against Ken Lay and the friends he purchased are the ones that are today not scheduling rolling blackouts ala Southern California.
Given the current state of the economy and the stock market, I personally would be careful about applying "they just dont' get it" type arguments.
sPh
sPh
First time I've heard a scheme for moving pricing closer to the microeconomic ideal called "communism"!
sPh
Anything that sends high-speed data is going to require some way to get the signal around the pole transformer. For serious data rates (DSL and up), a router on the pole with a fibre-optic uplink to the headend is necessary.
There's a privacy issue with these things. If you have a receiver for the signals, you can watch the power consumption of everybody in your neighborhood. And if you have a transmitter, you may be able to turn some loads on and off. These things don't seem to have strong crypto.
That's funny, I thought the The Electric Company used television waves for data...
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Field tests have demonstrated bit rates in excess of 300 Baud, and an industry spokesman said that they have hopes to get the speed up to 1200 Baud by the time of the official rollout.
In response to this announcement, the Water Utilities Association issued a press release outlining their plans for a competing acoustic Internet service. They pointed out that sound travels faster in water than in gas, so they will be able to provide lower latencies. Experts remain skeptical, however. They point out that it will take years of additional research to solve the interference problems caused by 'flushing toilet syndrome'.
There are also rumors of work on a hybrid liquid-gas Internet service via sewer lines.
Scientific American has a good article on this technology. The problem in the US is the design of the dirstribution system (that part that gets teh power from the transmission lines to the end user). In the US, their are transformers fro small groups of loads - so every 5 or 6 houses will have their own transformer (Thakes 480 to 220, as I recall), which must be bypassed to transmit data over power lines.
I see several reasons why twe won't be getting access from our power company anytime soon:
1. It's unlikely that enough customers will sign in each final node to cover the cost of installing and maintaing a transformer;
2. Given the variablity in quality, wiring type, grounding, etc, from house to house, the costs of getting and maintaining reliable service could be high;
3. Given the glut of fiber and the number of companies going under that own fiber, it may be cheaper to buy a provuder than buidout you're own interface.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
No... it was because streetlights acted as transmitters for the signals and killed various parts of the spectrum with noise, namely police and ham frequencies.