Slashdot Mirror
Broadband via Power Cables trials in Scotland
Wacko writes "Scottish Hydro-Electric have started a trial of Broadband internet access via power lines. Just plug the modem into any power point in your house, with no need for additional lines into the house, and reasonably priced too. Details are a bit scketchy right now but interesting to see how the trial goes."
The contractor bringing this to homes in North America is Current Technologies. They have a demo home set up with Pepco and will be doing customer trials this year.
Competition == Good.
how do they break the network into segments ?
Having to unnecessarily isolate power as well as data seems like a lot of extra complexity.
Now that is more interesting.
People on dial ups in rural America are watching and praying.
Never confuse volume with power.
I wonder how much more viable this is over existing implementations in the us. I remember waiting for over a year for cable because local fiber lines rendered DSL impossible for my apartment. To my dismay, once cable became available in Dallas, most apartment complexes had already been talked into restricting internet access to dial-up of DirectTV internet access.
Fine! You don't have to yell at me! But do repeat what you just said though because something's going on in my head.
I believe Norweb (or what was Norweb at that time) attempted to do much the same. Didn't their attempt fail badly due to some sort of interference from the current (not exactly sure)?
---
"An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind" - Gandhi
Whoa. Never thought they'd actually start using that. Doesn't the 'filth' of badly-regulated appliances disturb the signal? I really really wonder how this will turn out, and... if it would be used worldwide?
If so it could be pretty amusing. Suck up a lot of bandwidth downloading porn and lose power to your house!
Talk about bandwidth limitations!
Ddn't someone try this in Germany or England and discard the idea because all the transmissions could be received with some sort of antenna near the power lines?
Anything you say will be held against you.
With all the transients, interference, noise, et cetera that are on power lines, this is going to be a big flop, mark my words. I've seen research on power-line data transport protocols before -- it's unreliable at best. They're better off going wireless, something long range. Perhaps stationary 802.11a with repeaters?
It's bad already with overloads in the phone lines due to lightning. Optical cables are better for that reason (unless I am mistaken)...
My friend Isaac would like to test out this service.
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
It's real!
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
It would be interesting to see the speed and distance limitations. Considering a fully equipped DSLAM is costing a half a mil or so, serving this might be a cheaper route.
Anyone have an equipment manufacturer name or link?
My ISP might be interested...
Get paid to code OSS
Man, I wish I lived there! Their speed comparisions implies the download speed is 2Mbps (about 4x a 512Kbps line)! And the pricing is great - either 15 or 25 pounds/month! That's about 25 or 40 USD/month! Sweet.
I plugged my modem into the wall, and all I got was this lousy dialtone!
Would there be a significant reduction in speed using this? I know LinkSys came out with some power cable networking; I think it went about 11 megabits/second.
This is going to give "lightning fast internet" a new meaning.
Thought they had a method of doing this...
http://www.mediafusionllc.com/
Here in the Netherlands these kind of test are still running but haven't come up with anything yet. Too much problems as it seems. Similar tests in Germany came up zilch as well.
One of the things is, as mentioned in another post, that there is way too much interference from badly constructed appliances and household electrical goofups like badly connected power outlets.
What about those people who don't have electricity? I mean, I feel really left out by all these schemes that are advertised as being "available to everybody". Honestly, I have a gas computer, and it's really annoying to be marginalised like this.
6 outlet power strip + 6 modems + 1 BSD box + 6 NIC's == DS3?
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
I have been told by many people that when you run network cable near Electric it would cause noise problems. So this to me now seems almost blasphemous.
I'm not a Electrical Eng. but this sounds like the signal would be crap.
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
I wonder if this could be adapted for LAN usage here in the US. If so I would def want to look into it. Does anyone know what the max throughput is from one point in a house to another point in the same house?
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
I remember hearing about a similar trial in Germany (Netherlands maybe???), that was pulled because it generated RF interferance as the data travelled down the powerlines... something about the lines being unsheilded... Anyone remember what I'm blabbing about???
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
So, I can just plug the reciever into my UPS and never have any internet downtime.
Oh, wait...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The prices are reasonable, at £15/month + VAT, but that is subject to change at the end of the trial period (31 December 2003). The price appears to be this low due to a grant from the Highlands and Islands Enterprise, and the Department of Trade and Industry.
At the moment, availability for the trial is limited to Creiff and Campbelltown, Hopefully this will be extended (I live in Aberdeen - by no means Rural, but this would still be useful for me personally).
There is a form provided for users to register their interest in the service... Perhaps if enough people register, this service will be rolled out on a wider scale... Here's hoping...
Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!
Is it too little, too late?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Your vagina or your mind?
HelpUsObi 1
Celebacy. Obvious, really. As far as I know, a lot of Slashdot readers practice it, and it frees up brain space for hacking.
Every year we hear about another PLC technology that turns out to have some little problem they dont tell us about. Problems that remain to be solved are ROUTING, if lightining hits a powerline in florida, you can theoretically hear it in california. This means data persists across the WHOLE grid. Until a viable routing solution is developed PLC is only good for a LAN. Another issue in bringing it to the states is we have 1 transformer for 5-6 houses, whereas in Europe a transformer can serve a much wider area. And at the transformer data can be lost unless it is amplified (costly to put on on every transformer in USA).
This technology is still years out, so don't get your hopes uo.
http://computertimes.asia1.com.sg/v20020501/updt01 .shtml
I'd love to see some more detailed technical information on this. It sounds like a great alternative to dialup in small, rural communities, where the only high speed alternative at the moment is the pricey satellite dish type.
Speeds, how it works, how it manages to NOT fry your PC during power outages (does it work during power outages?), are all questions I'd love to know the answers to...
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
If been in a trial in NL, and it worked sorta OK
until I plugged a dodgy TV into a near socket.
Apparently the TV blew back a few volts down the line which in its turn took down the modem....
Not a pleasant experience.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
One of the things is, as mentioned in another post, that there is way too much interference from badly constructed appliances and household electrical goofups like badly connected power outlets.
None of that is, IMHO, a showstopper.
Contrary to the myths expounded by Hollywood and the RIAA, the lackluster adoption of broadband isn't the lack of "content" (the illogic of their arguments demonstrate this when, with the next breath, the proclaim massive losses due to copyright violated "content" being actively traded on the very same internet).
Broadband/DSL is being actively sabataged by the baby bells in the US and quite possibly by similiar entities elsewhere in the world. These people own the last mile of copper, connecting that mostly unused glass network to your home. It is this monopoly that the FCC was supposed to regulate, but has chosen not to despite the law requiring them to, and it is this monopoly that must be broken for the internet, and broadband/DSL, to thrive.
If the interference problems were a result of the electrical infrastructure (bad substations, bad transformers, crappy power lines, etc.) then we'd have a problem. But if it is a result of bad home wiring, noisy appliances, or what have you, then the problem is emminently solvable, and the approach still a very valid solution to the Last Mile Monopoly.
Simply put, the data receiver could be placed adjascent to the home's power coupling, prior to the current entering the home (with all of its noise appliances and crappy wiring). The data could then be sent throughout the home on standard cat5 or cat7, or wireless, sans the interference everyone keeps worrying about.
Granted, you lose the ability to use any old outlet as a data port, but that is a small price to pay for getting data without dealing with either the baby bell monopolies or the cable monopolies, and that is where the real value lies.
Speaking as one who is about to lose their excellent Sprint 8Mbit down/1 Mbit up DSL service because of the local Ameritech Last Mile Monopoly and the FCC's willful negligence in enforcing the law, anything that puts those fucking assholes out of business, or even competes on a level playing field, is Good News(tm) regardless.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Power lines are noisy, and not just a little bit. Then you've got the whole shielding issue (mentioned in other posts). X10 made a home communication thing that used powerlines as the means of transmission (had to build a reciever for one in college) and the amount of crap that comes through on those lines is disgusting.
Look at the reviews of home networking / print sharing equipment over powerlines... the speed is pretty poor. Heres a review over at firingsquad While those speeds may be fine for internet sharing in one household, imagine trying to put together an entire town?
Maybe they've got something else going on though. Best of luck to them.
There's currently a big thing in the UK about local loop unbundeling. The local loop are the wires that run from the exchange to your house.
It would appear that the plan is to use the local electric loop (run a few feet underground in the UK) and switch it on to conventional lines at the substation.
I started to make some RS232 plugs that worked in a simila way about 10 or so years ago, you could get about 14k with home kit at the time.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I always like to lick the live leads of the internet connection to make sure I have a good signal.
Will this new fangled electrical internet scheme prevent me from doing that?
that I can read /. on my UPS now?
They tried a similar thing in my hometown of Hydroshock, WA. However the combined water/power delivery proved to often be lethal to customers. Also tests concerning combined natural gas and medicinal oxygen delivery were discontinued due to "less than ideal preliminary results".
I work in the broadband industry for one of the larger cable companies and the question I have with this technology is how they break up the users so that they don't overload a particular box. In the cable industry we have CMTS boxes that handle a group of people from a particular node. From my understanding the way powerlines are layed out is completely different. Just a thought.
The exclusions are printed below for your edification. Note that hardcore, and disguising the origin of content are specifically excluded. Sorry Slashdotters, you'll have to give this one a pass or *gasp* break the acceptable use terms!
:
Also, #9 excludes the service's use by the RIAA.
The Services must not be used
1. For any unlawful purposes or activities.
2. To attempt to violate, compromise or in any way breach the security or integrity of other internet users systems, networks or data including, but not limited to, the transmission of viruses or other programs intended to interfere in any way with other internet users systems, networks or data.
3. upload, post, send or receive e-mail any content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, threatening, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;
4. For the purposes of receiving, possessing, storing, distributing or publishing of any obscene or otherwise unlawful material including, but not limited to, any form of hardcore and/or child pornography or to harm minors in any way. 5. To cause a breach of copyright, intellectual property, data protection or other third party rights by downloading, uploading or the transmission of information, software or any other material covered by such rights.
6. impersonate any person or entity, falsely state or otherwise misrepresent your affiliation with a person or entity or disguise the origin of any content;
7. upload, post or e-mail any content that you do not have a right to transmit under any law or under contractual or fiduciary relationships;
8. upload, post or e-mail any unsolicited or unauthorised advertising, promotional materials, 'junk mail', 'spam', 'chain letters', or any other form of solicitation;
9. upload, post or e-mail any content that contains computer viruses or any other computer code, files or programs designed to interrupt, destroy or limit the functionality of any computer software, hardware or telecommunications equipment;
10. violate any applicable national or international laws or regulations.
Stop Continental Drift! Reunite Gondwanaland!
Next time I plug in my vacuum cleaner it's going to start humming the Britney Spears songs being transfered over my neighbors Kazaa session. Or turning on and off to that annoying Eminem beat.
This is indeed very real. I know for a fact that at least 2 power companies in the US will be rolling out services like this in the beginning of 2003. Its extremely similar to cable in the sense that it goes by little neighborhood community groups. So its not going to have this huge rollout. Its actually gonna be a little slow, and troublesome. At this time this technoology does not give broadband to places in the boonies like I have read in some previous posts. This technology will only give broadband to areas that have enough people to support the costs of installing it.
Timmy! Get your toothbrush out of that power outlet immediately!!! Stop messing with Daddy's downloads.
Todays phrase: ParaSIGtic Capacitance
Tried that, didn't work. :-( Still trying to get rid of that purple smoke...
Sounds like a powerful idea with a lot of potential. Could transform the online world. Hope these reports are well grounded.
In honor of the upcoming James Bond movie, it has to be said:
"Shocking, but more power too you."
(duck)
-----
"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
Here in Virginia, USA, the power company "Dominion Power" is closely tied to "Dominion Communications". The issue is simple. If you want to run copper (or fiber) between two locations, you need continuous right-of-way . You need legal access to a swath of land between both locations that has no point where you do not have the ability to dig a trench. There are only 3 groups that have this. Governments (along the roads), Railroads (like the way Qwest did it) and power companies. (unless I dimm-wittedly forgot somebody)
It seems silly to me for an organization that HAS continuous righ-of-ways to bother with troubled technologies when they can actually lay their own fiber, and charge silly amounts of money to other companies to lease their left over strands.
___ I don't respond to Anonymous Cowards, and I Never Mod them UP.
I've heard of this, I sure hope it goes well. This would make it (more) possible for lamers like me who live in shitty areas to get descent speed.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
Does anyone know if this is accurate?
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
Actually to be correct, that Hertz.
___ I don't respond to Anonymous Cowards, and I Never Mod them UP.
Although the idea of transmitting data through power lines is VERY interesting, why don't they wait a little longer for the new wireless technology that is going to be available within the next year or so.
... and I'm sure most schools in Europe have this as well) and to make bandwidth available to EVERYONE no matter where you go. This will be paid for by a small additional property tax that eveyone will pay.
.... besides, I have already lost enough network cards to lightning storms .... now the lightning will be backed by even more power .... Netgear and 3Com must LOVE that idea!
....
There is a new wireless technology that will be made freely available that has a range of 20 to 30 miles!! The proposed idea is to have this placed in every school (since most schools in the US now have bandwidth
Don't get me wrong, the idea of being able to plug my PC into a power outlet for Internet access does sound interesting, but I think the future is in wireless
The world is going to go wireless, so don't invest into equipment that will be worthless in a year or so
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Make it illegal to recieve most spam.
Now what do I do about all this smoke?
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
This is okay for all you modern electricity enabled people. We're still waiting for oil and gas, and have only just got coal. (we've had fire for a few years, but not in such a compact form)
Ah well. I shouldn't complain - my brother is still waiting for technologies such as "wheels" and "sharp sticks"
Well, it would be good, wouldn't it?
Here at work (an industrial plant) we use Siemens ASi bus controlers to do a lot of process control. The concept is similar in that the power and communications are routed on the same conductors. The filtering to do this is very important, and we use some very special isolation transformers, and large filtering UPS's to make the power ultra clean. This also limits the distance of the circuits, as the longer the conductor, the greater the chance of interference. It seems to me that this trail of network-over-power transmission lines will be doomed from interference.
Too bad the rates are metered. But at least you can watch the spinny thing on the side of your house while you're waiting for Snatch to come down.
"Derp de derp."
and it's easy to put between the HV side and the LV side of a transformer. Colleges have been doing this trick for decades..ever hear of Carrier Current AM signals?
like this? *grin*
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
A pair of DSL modems can act as an ethernet bridge, but they're also modems. Unless phone lines suddenly became digital since the last time I checked.
This has been argued over a lot already. In my opinion, modulating a digital signal on to a carrier doesn't make it analogue. You can argue that all digital signals are really analogue, and that all analogue signals are really digital, because they have noise below a certain depth.
That sounds a bit confusing, but basically, if you've got a really rubbish '16-bit' sound card, that introduces loads of noise below a certain level, well then it's not 16-bit. By definition a 16-bit DAC cannot have noise above that level. This USENET post from 1982 (!) sums it up nicely:
USENET post
I quote - "If a 16 bit D/A introduces noise above -96dB, it isn't a 16 bit D/A, by definition."
A couple of articles I found. I haven't them read properly, but looks intresting
s 3. shtml
... s it ion-paper-on-PLT.pdf
http://www.networkmagazineindia.com/200208/focu
COMPATIBILITY BETWEEN RADIO COMMUNICATIONS SERVICES AND POWER
http://www.darc.de/referate/ausland/plc/RSGB-po
~www.devnull.co.uk
Can you imagine the Purchase Order for 4000 miles of waterproof cable?
This is Just Vaporware
Yeah this has been tried all over the place. --or more like promised all over the place. I have yet to see anyone who actually made this work with any reliability
For kicks, I tried entering in a bunch of different postcodes, every one of them said it wasn't recognized - I doubt they ever will be either.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
You are correct sir.
:P
The reason they call it a "Modem" rather than a bridge is the less technologically inclined would try to use pairs of bridges to span small bodies of water and run over them with cars.
According to one SWB technician: "We call them modems because that's what the users call them, technically it's a DSL-ATM to Ethernet bridge router or "brouter" most people don't know what this is so they refer to it as "modem" or "black box" (in the case of the SpeedStram 5260,5660 modems)"
In the case of Time Warner Cable:"We call them modems because the users call them modems. If we started calling them highspeed routers they would get confused. Ever listen to someone refer to the mouse as "the clicky thing" and when you ask about the mouse they give you a funny look?""
Or... after the TW/AOL merger: "We call them modems because AOL says they're modems and we figure that they MUST be right because they have been spoonfeeding us the internet ever since they created it. "
FYI: The AOL/TW merger and the bridges comments are jokes, the rest are actual fact. I'm going back to bed now.
Partnership for an idiot free America!
It is the twisted dream of the Power Providers to be your Broadband provider also. Do you think that the California power crisis, a while back was just one of those things? No, it was orchestrated by Duke, Relient, and Enron, in order to create a more favorable climate for them to take over that buisness. ( Think, what busnesses were hurt by having their utility bill increes by 1100%). If you looked at any of these parasite companies Homepage during this time, you would have seen them talking about broadband, and how they are going to be the leaders in providing it. Personaly, I do not want Enron, Duke, etc providing my Broadband access!!!
Does anyone have specs on the proposed speed of this technology.. I couldn't seem to find anything on the website.
10mbit, 100mbit?
Are there any sites that have end user reviews of this technology
--jW-
Actually with it being the Campbeltown area the USAF/NASA/insert-latest-conspiracy will be loving their highspeed links! (i.e. the runway at Machrihanish and the stationing of US personnel there).
Notwithstanding the monopoly they might be able to get among really rural customers, they're going to have a tough time gaining much of a toe-hold in the Scottish market.
They intended to charge £25 for the basic residential service, Telewest already offer a very good cable broadband service: £25 for 512kb, £35 for 1MB (although, to be eligible for those prices you need to be a subscriber to their at least their basic tv and telephone line packages which costs £11 a month, pretty good value in it's own right).
Two quite nice features of Hydro's service are the fact that they don't charge a connection fee and their minimum service term is only ONE MONTH!! That's as opposed to the minimum one year all of the cable and ADSL providers insist upon.
The DSL signal is just using the copper pair for connectivity, the same way that 10/100baseT uses cat5 for connectivity.
As for a pair of DSL modems acting as a bridge, it is a actually pair of bridges connecting two networks (home computer/LAN-public/private network of provider). One side is the DSLAM (one port on one card is the receiving bridge) and the other side is the DSL bride.
I guess this is just a pet peeve of mine, that people are not educated, and actually treated like dummies. (but that is an entire ask slashdot article in itself)
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
now thats cool... i mean wet..errrr..
One of their reasons to get broadband is:
You'll never need to visit a record store again -buy and download albums in seconds!
I like the way they think...too bad the RIAA won't. Sounds like more IP's are gonna be blocked.
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
Nice comments. Are you sure that the last comment was ficticous? It sounds about right. At least in the eyes of my GF's Family. They are clueless. Paying for AOL dialup (what is it now? $85.00/mo) and also paying for cable. You would think that they would at least do the BYOIC (bring your own internet connection) option. AOL sucks (but we aready knew that.)
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
Actually, I understand that cable modems really are modems (DSL is definitely not a modem); they have to modulate and demodulate the signals so that the cable TV network understands how to send it. The main differences between cable and phone-line modems, apart from the obvious differences, are that the cable modem has much more available room for its data and much less inherent latency.
Doubtful. Maybe in some old crappy cable systems that deliver the high speed connection over their coax wire but require you to have a real modem to dial out and SEND data, but strangely enough, most of the cable companies that sell broadband mysterious roll-out "digital cable" at the same time they start selling "cable modems".
http://www.mediafusionllc.com/ .. look out for the packet kiddies
moo
I tested this about 5 years ago in Manchester (uk) for Norweb, and some swedish firm, it was really fast and really really good, but they took it off us after about 12months, because the government rejected it saying it would increase radiation over the national grid, how lame is that!
:(
I can't seem to find any related websites they're all down now
What is cool is that I was the first person to run Linux and an Acorn off an internet connection driven through the power lines, well I like to think I am!!
I remember it being really easy to use as all you had to do was plug the 'modem' in and it worked! You could even move your computer without moving network points etc. I do remember some houses in the area needing a new master fuse and fuse box for some reason, I guess it must be because of the wiring being outdated or some thing!
James
This Article mentions opbjections to the previous UK trial which caused problems with Low Power (Licence Free) radio systems (ISM band etc.).
What if I run my house off solar power? Is that anything like satellite broadband?
It is really simple technology, its quite an old consept as well!
All you do is transmit down the powerlines at a frequency that isn't being used by the power. Power in the UK is transmitted at 50Hz so if you transmit the signal at, say, 50kHz then you can easily recieve the signal by just taking a feed of the live or neutral and comparing it to earth. Then convert the signal as it will come in like a TV signal down an ariel. The only trouble is that that frequency will be interfered with, and radio and Tv signals at that frequency will be messed with.
I seem to remember that when I trialed it about 5 years ago they left the transciever, I might dig it out and see if any signals leak down to manchester, Hell I could set up a VERY Private Network with my neighbour and get Broadbank ant half the price!
We have Hydro One in Canada and they serve to business, no residential access tho :( It can reach up to 100 mbps.
This was tried by anther company Scottish Telecom (part of the Scottish Power group, and owners of Demon Internet - Sottish Telecom are now called 'Thus' following a 'Monday' style re-branding exercise, the initial literature for which amusingly misspelt 'companys' on the first page IIRC) when I was working for SOL (Scottish Telecom Internet Division). This was following on from identical work by the US company NORWEB.
The speeds at the time were ~28 kbps. They (Scottish Telecom) trailed the service by giving the equipment ('modem' + Compaq PC) to schools to gain feedback - they let the school's keep the PC's afterwards, which was nice.
They dropped the trail after they discovered the speed dropped dramatically when the grid was under strain...
e.g.
- at ~6:00pm when the street lights came on.
- When kettles were boiled for Tea following the ending of TV soaps like Eastenders or Coronation Street (I kid you not)
The most amusing story relates to how Ham radio operators discovered that lamp posts in the area were acting as broadcast antennas and broadcasting users packets over the neighborhood. ST denied this emphatically, though it was true (though it's not clear that it was actually possible to get any meaningful data out of the 'interference' that was being broadcast as no-one ever seriously suggested they had done this).
Dosen't it bother anyone else that EVEN MOTOROLA calls it a " Cable Modem " on it's box. bleh... Marketing Drones......
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
In Spain this technology are taking off. The most important power corporation here (Endesa) are doing the "Massive Test" since february in Zaragoza, (Medium/Big city with about 600,000 hab) with about 2000 test users. Before, more simple experiences taked place in Barcelona and Sevilla.
They use two technologies one with 2/3 Mb/sec (ASCOM) and another with 6/11 Mb/sec (DS2). I personaly used one of this stations and worked pretty well. The big problem at first was that "Modems" were huge (I saw it, huge an heavy), but last time a talked with one of the technicians said they can reduce it now to a DSL modem size.
Seems to work well if they take that big and expensive test.
More info at PLC-Endesa
(Beware of the Flash!!)
==
That's the time harvesters,that's the time to be care
get back all this people, so ostentatious and arrogan
It would interesting to find out if this interferes with X-10 powerline carrier technology. It would be more interesting to find out if it interferes, regardless of whether you subscribe to the hydro line high speed Internet service or not.
I don't live out in BFE either (bumble f#$% egypt). If you drive down the road you see 1 tranformer per house...give or take a house.
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
Actually, about 1.6 billion people (about 25% of Earth's total) don't have access to electricity.
Something you may find interesting:
/.'ers have pointed out, there are just too many speed inhibiting issues with and no guarentee of decent QOS by trying to piggy back on existing infrastructure - meaning it's only suitable for light home use at best. Certainly claims to do this have been around for at least 4 years now and have yet to amount to anything beyond what can best be described as mediocre trials. :-(
It has been discovered that using fiber to strenthen overhead power lines instead of more traditional steel is cheaper and has in fact been done already.
Because fiber is lighter than steel there is less sag on the power lines meaning the struts can be significantly further apart (which saves money). Additional value is gained because the fiber can be resold at some later date, and by using it in new power lines it means there is no additional digging.
The only expense is terminating the fiber, which is a one off cost and easily written off.
I think this is more viable because as other
As Renton pointed out:
Tommy (looking at the hills): "Doesn't it make you proud to be Scottish?"
Renton (drunk, 'clean,' and pissed off): "It's shite being Scottish! We're the lowest of the low! The scum of the fucking Earth! The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization! Some people hate English. I don't! They're just wankers! We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers! Can't even find a decent culture to be colonized by! We're ruled by effete arseholes! It's a shite state of affairs to be in, Tommy! And all the fresh air in the world won't make any fucking difference."
Can't wait for Irving Welsh to start blogging...
(A.C. takes his buprenorphine & shuts up)
You moron. Look up "ADSL DMT Modulation", or "Discrete MultiTone". Of course it's analogue. Being at a higher frequency doesn't make it the slightest bit less analogue.
I've been reading about this for years now, but for one reason or another companies have not been able to make this technology work outside the lab. If they could, the potential bandwidth would be measured in the giga or terabit per second, rather than the meager megabits DSL and Cable can provide.
He's some history on this subject as told by the media:
Here's an article from 3.5 years ago claiming, "U.S. Gets Ready For Internet Over Power Lines."
Here's another only 2+ year old suggesting, "Internet access over power lines nears reality."
Another only 1 year old saying,"Internet access via power lines reborn in Europe."
I'll start making plans for it when a get a piece of Junk mail from CP&L (my power company) offering 1 month free access to their new ISP service. Until then I'll remain very sceptical
I like this idea especially since I have a mild distaste of the telephone company. However, I have a few questions:
If the technology works fairly well and is pushed into rural America (where I happen to live), they'll definitely have to solve the all too common power outages, right? And what about those nasty brown-outs?
From what I recall, one of the problems with earlier models (I believe this was in Discover magazine or maybe Scientific American) was the line noise created by motors. Would this mean you would have no Internet while you vacuumed the house?
The electrical systems in Europe are significantly different than those here in the States. What are some of the problems that would be faced attempting to expand the technology to the US market? It's a stupid question, but I'm curious.
Finally, what about power surges? With telephone lines, you can at least put a surge supressor on it, cross your fingers and hope a surge or lightning strike down the road fries the supressor instead. What effect would a supressor have, if any, on the signal? I'm sure that's a foolish question and the effect would probably be next to nothing, but with all the noise created by different devices, how on Earth do they expect to overcome these particular issues while transmitting data for, say, even a mile or two?
He who has no
"Scottish Hydro-Electric are launching a trial _scheme_ which brings broadband..."
Don't think that word means what you think it means.
All levity aside, I am hoping this technology proves to be incredibly successful. As I imagine many of this threads post point out, rural capable broadband (and urban competetion)...
Why not? Ultrasonics can travel down a gas-filled pipe.
Too bad "fluidics" never encountered Moore's law.
/ ml fabfinalproject.htm
http://web.media.mit.edu/~paulo/courses/howmake
>If the technology works fairly well and is pushed into rural America (where I happen to live), they'll definitely have to solve the all too
common power outages, right?
Seems they may not be a big deal for most folks, if your power is out how are you going to use your computers? Anyway most power outages don't last that last long(couple secs) which wouldn't be a big deal for broadband.
Oh Billy's little web server is getting /.'ed
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
Thats it I am moving to scotland. Drinking scotch, eating haggis and enjoying easily accessible broandband.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
...to lay some fiber?(you thought i was going to say screw in a lightbulb)
Technology for this has been developed. (as Dave Barry would say, "I am not making this up.") Check out this article from the Gas Technology Institute.
--z
In Soviet Russia, the Beowulf cluster imagines you!
I once saw a documentary on the running of the national grid here in the UK. When the adverts come on in Coronation Street there is a marked jump in power usage as thousands of people put the kettle on. Does this mean that my pylon powered broadband grinds to a halt for the edinburgh tattoo, take the high road, monarch of the glen and the PGA tournaments at loch lomond and st andrews?
The swedish company sydkraft (www.sydkraft.se)
:)
is already doing this and it works fine.
They already have datakables drawn to mosttransformerstations so they just hook the extra data on the right side and fire away.
Their page is in swedish so if you whant to read use the fish
I didn't realise they had power up there. Oh, hang on. Maybe that's why there's no interference...
Bullshit.
DMT DSL (which is the DSL modulation used pretty much everywhere) is most definitely a modulated analog signal. DMT is 256 concurrent narrow-band QAM (Quadrature amplitude modulation) channels with variable constellation sizes (up to 15 bit constellations) with a 4KHz (data-)symbol rate. Cable modems use a wide-band QAM channel with a fixed constellation size and a much higher symbol rate.
Building any QAM device without a DAC/ADC and a DSP is a hopeless task. It is most definitely a modem.
QAM, BTW, is what was used for V.34 (33.6Kb/s) voice modems (more-or-less, anyway - there some pretty major differences in implementation but the idea is the same)
Tim
I see a lot of posts about briding the transformers and such. In Connecticut, they just spent lord-knows how much retrofitting everyone's electric meter to be readable via wireless from the street; presumably a similar rollout of transformer-bridging wouldn't be too impossible.
A lot of people are talking about the last-generation technologies, but HomePlug - HomePlug.org is obviously the choice to bridge from pole to house, and apparently gets much better speeds than the 300kbits quoted for previous tech.
I think Intel was one of the backers for this, while AMD helped found HomePNA. I'm not sure I'm a fan of either, but it's definitely the right application in this case.
Poles bridging to 802.11 wouldn't be impossible, either; Ricochet used to put their repeater stations into the tops of streetlamps. The cities/power companies got new lamps on Ricochet's dime, and the ISP got the opportunity to tap power and provide service.
Instead of sending the data over the power conductor as current/voltage changes, why not run hollow conductors and take advantage of the waveguide effect to shoot broadband RF down the center of the conductor? Hollow conductors are lighter, and since we're talking about AC here, they'd have the same 60Hz current-carrying capacity thanks to the skin effect. They'd also offer little or no radiated RF, so there'd be no interference to other radio services.
Getting the AC without disturbing the data would be easy - hook to the outside of the conductor. Getting at the data would be equally easy - poke a tiny hole in the conductor and insert a small resonant antenna, just like you'd do with regular waveguide.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The Thus rebranding was in some ways rather good (ie it's a real word, rather than something made up and wanky like Avaya or Accenture, and it's short and difficult to spell).
Of course, their full name is 'letitbethus', which loses both of those qualities, and in either case, their name is only pronounceable in English and Greek, thereby limiting its usefulness in attacking European markets.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's