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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.
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.
The project was abandoned.
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
sure, if you can run new cables, go for opto.
but who's going to pay for laying of fiber all over europe? if they can possibly get by with the existing wiring, why not try?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I don't see how that would be much of a disadvantage, unless you like to send your credit card number without ssl - and that has always been a bad idea. The party with the most motive and ability to monitor unencryptied communications is the Government, and they already can and do.
Heh... My ADSL connection is a reliable 2.5Mbps, for about $35 a month (Sweden). Care to immigrate? OTOH, you might want to consider Japan instead. They've recently rolled out 14(!)Mbps ADSL for about $20(!) a month.
Mmmmm.... Bandwidth.... Drool...
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
here
Anything you say will be held against you.
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.
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.
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.
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The biggest problem is getting the signal through the pole pigs (can-type transformers on top of the hydro poles) -- they are big iron monstrosities that don't pass much past 1kHz or so due to their design.
One method which can be used is to simply wire some high voltage capacitors across the primary and secondary of the transformer -- they'll conduct at high frequencies (you tune this) and voila -- your signal jumps the transformer.
Of course, the problem with that is you're no longer isolated from the street-line voltages -- anywhere from about 6.9kV to 44kV, depending on who else is in your neighbourhood. The "right" way to do it is to have a line-powered conveter box at each pole pig which jumps the transformer optically, but that's expensive.
I've always been a fan of power line transmission. There's one in particular I was always amused by (no link handy) -- they claimed that by using a maser they could modulate the magnetic field without altering the voltage and current. I wonder what they think of Maxwell.
It was under the brandname "Powerline", and yes, it failed and was abandoned. This was due to noise on the line more than anything else - a huge chunk of the electricity switching network in the UK, the National Grid, is *old* and electrically noisy. When power is switched it causes a spike on the circuit which then rather noisily settles down, trashing the data that was transmitted. Not to mention all the inductive properties of wires for collecting interference. What we found was that the technology was sound, and it did indeed work (there are still some of the schools we used for the trial using it), just a lot slower than was hoped. Too slow for viable commercial use it was felt.
Basically, if you are a power company looking to get into data, and have a modern, low-noise, distribution network, then this may well be viable. Of course, for rural Scotland this will be a lot more viable than urban Manchester with fibre running everywhere, because you could charge more for it and still be cheaper than the competing technologies. Or alternatively have better response times than them - Quake via satellite broadband? ROTFLMAO. ;)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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?
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
It has to be in Scotland, of course, the only nation that can talk directly to modems, Ach, eeeeiiiieee....
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes