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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.
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.
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)...
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!
This is going to give "lightning fast internet" a new meaning.
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.
6 outlet power strip + 6 modems + 1 BSD box + 6 NIC's == DS3?
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
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!
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.
that I can read /. on my UPS now?
You're correct zen old mate :P
The frequencies used induced harmonics in electric streetlamps which were all across the shortwave region of the spectrum. I can only assume that they're using a different frequency (lower bandwidth) or that they have a filtering plan for the public lighting systems.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
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.
Sounds like a powerful idea with a lot of potential. Could transform the online world. Hope these reports are well grounded.
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.
In comments for a story about broadband via power cables, I link to a picture of an ethernet cable with a powercord-like end on it, and two moderators think this is somehow offtopic? Just what is on topic?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Actually to be correct, that Hertz.
___ I don't respond to Anonymous Cowards, and I Never Mod them UP.
Make it illegal to recieve most spam.
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.
Nope. You can do it. Once.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
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
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.
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).
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
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
So you're saying it would be alright for property owners who may or may not even own a computer, and who may be perfectly happy with dial-up for email, to be forced to support your bandwidth needs? ...and don't even get me started on what kind of service you should expect out of an entrenched government agency.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
>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."
People are still trying though.. The aforementioned Current Technologies and Amperion are trying to develop a viable product for the US. The distribution transformer is still the killer. More information on the power line broadband space can be found at the United Power Line Council.
Oh, BTW.. There was a story on /. a few months back on Luke Stewart and Media Fusion. Apparently, they have mended their fences and Stewart is back peddling his mumbo-jumbo, too-hard-for-anyone-but-Luke-to-understand technology known as "Advanced Subcarrier Modulation [ASCM] (TM)."
--z
In Soviet Russia, the Beowulf cluster imagines you!
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