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Broadband over Powerlines
scubacuda writes "Today's Bottom Line links to an article on Internet-over-powerline technology. St. Louis-based Ameren Corp and other utilities are testing are testing the technology, and, according to the article, "many consider it increasingly viable." Proponents claim the powergrid technology will bolster broadband competition, lower consumer prices and bridge the digital divide in rural areas. Skeptics say that few tests prove its financial and technical viability. Kludge, panacea, or hoax? (I'd think it was a total crock had I not personally known someone working in India with a PCL company)"
Didn't we have problems with this when it was trialed a few years back i nthe UK? i'm sure I heard reports of lamposts going haywire, any URL's?
The only problem I see is that every overhead power line is going to turn into a giant antenna picking up interference. My school got squeemish enough about a teacher with too long of an ethernet cable, what about miles and miles of power lines out in the open during an electrical storm?
Next thing you know they'll be telling us they can send TV over broadband wires!
It's not TCP/IP over power lines that's interesting, it's electricity over TCP/IP (RFC 3251). That is a much newer and hotter idea, and much more interesting to smoke in the long run.
The "digital divide," right now, largely consists of people who aren't on-line. Let's face it: a dirt-cheap Linux PC can be had for ~$200 at Wal-Mart; it's the $20/mo that keep people from being on-line. ($40/mo for broadband.) That, and the whole problem with rural areas, too. Through the wonders of electrification, we could now also have "digification." This could be a huge boon for those who might otherwise be left behind...
Transmission-line Internet is, IMO, a great idea whose time has come.
But...
I can't see this happening for quite a while, in the US at least. The Baby Bells and the cable monopolies will tie this up in court for years, all the while jacking up their prices to feed their war chests, and Joe User will sit there and shuck out the bucks, completely oblivious to what's going on. Small dialup providers may turn out to be the big winners of such a battle, at least in the short term.
The solution: power transmission utilities need to quietly but quickly deploy, especially in the mentioned rural areas (like where I am) that can't get either cable or xDSL provisioned.
As always, YMMV. This is just my two cents' worth...save up the change for a new monitor or something.
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
next thing you know its gonna get in the phone lines.
I can't be certain, but I'm 90% certain that I have internet all over my pants right now.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
"While existing providers of broadband through cable TV lines or phone wires consider the technology intriguing, they stress that talk of it has been around for years, with nothing to show for it." I remember 4 or 5 years ago there was a company called MediaFusion that was doing the same thing and promised something like 5gb/s on a single power line. Last I heard (5 years ago) they were testing in Florida but I think the company eventually went under and nothing became of it. Then, the price for upgrading the entire US's power grid to provide service: ~$100 million. Cheap stuff.
No one seems to have cracked a proper commercial solution
Oh. I guess my 10 megabits a second from the local power company is just a hoax, then. Strange, it seems to work just fine...
In Sollentuna, Sweden, the local energy company is supplying broadband to apartments and even to ordinary houses. Yes, you read me right: these guys are drawing fiber to single-family houses at affordable cost, then lighting them up with 100 Mbits a second.
OTOH, there's nothing said about how they carry the TCP/IP. In my imagination, it's been fiber bundled with power lines. That's probably more economical than trying to piggyback..
In Israel the (single) power company used this technology for years for its own data communication.
I think the reason it never moved to other sectors involved both the high price of the required modems and the requirement for a licence (being a communication provider requires a licence, at least here in Israel) which was always a problem to gain here.
If this becomes reality I'm sure someone will invent a script to ddos crows sitting on their powerline.
Now THAT is funny. I make a reference to smoking a well-written April 1st RFC, hoping for a couple of "+1 Funny", and instead I get five points of "Interesting".
:-)
I wonder what RFCs the moderators are smoking.
And then the real clever hacks will flicker my light bulbs to induce that alpha-beta wave hypnosis thing I read about on a UFO site, so I know it's true.
And then someone will figure out inductive electromagnetic control of wire-sitting pigeons using the evanescent propagation mode of the power cables. Yeesh! Foul smelling flying rats dive-crapping and generally inconviencing passers-by. Is all this really worth fatser access to alt.linux.leatherfetish.penguins.penpen or whatever?
The saving grace will be that they'll never figure out how to impedance match to random pairs of tied-together sneakers hanging over the cables.
http://www.artgonepostal.com/image/soles6up.gif
--- Ban humanity.
The problem with any wire-based HF transmission system is reflections, standing waves, radiation and losses, and a power system by its very nature is not designed for HF. But the existence of the infrastructure - distribution stations, ducting, overhead supports - could make it a very good solution for stringing fibre. Overhead cables are inherently less prone to backhoe incidents than buried cables. There is a benefit to the electrical utility in that they can use the fibre to run their own control systems easily.
Any such idea needs to be planned in from the start- it could be a cheap add-on to rural electrification in places like India and China, but much harder to do in the US or Europe where cables have long service lives.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
A swedish company called ENKOM is building a net on the island of Gotland. Sadly the page is only in swedish. But they are now connecting customers. 2 Mbit/s, 10 Mbit/s under development.
The network consists of 48 fibres (24 pairs, each pair capable of delivering 2.5GB.) wrapped around the ESB's high voltage network.
Just as well, seeing as we're still waiting for ADSL
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
About a year ago German company RWE (big energy corporation) was cheered as the new leader in broadband connections via powerlines. It even was available to customers, but eventually they quit the powerline business in September 2002. Appearantly they had only 200 paying customers instead of the expected 120000.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
But let's not get too much into that: Powerlines are designed to be transport lines for 50-60Hz AC voltage, and these PLC solutions utilize the bandwidth under 30MHz.
Because the transport line isn't suitable for as high frequencies PLC solutions are using, losses for the transmitted signal are incredibly high. All this "lost" power that wasn't transmitted to the receiver, has been radiated into environment.
Thus, power lines act as a huge antenna, which leads into few things:
your data is not safe, eavesdropping is easy
HF radio bands get polluted, which not only annoys the radio amateurs, but also the army, ship traffic..
In Japan, power line communications were rejected, mostly because of the huge amount of interference.
Companies manufacturing the PLC equipment have tried to push down the amount of interference using spread spectrum techniques, which indeed drops the amount of interference in one spot frequency - but total amount of interference doesn't drop. And as you have huge number of PLC hubs in one area, interference sums up into high static noise level.
And what really sucks is, that basically PLC is a cable modem solution - user shares his bandwidth with the other users in area.
This PLC is simply put "a bad idea". Nice goal, but there are also sane ways in achieving it - like different DSL-technologies (or LRE) we already have available.
Here in Austria (not Australia!) tests were made with "the Internet via the outlet" over a year ago, but the tests were stopped, because there was too much interference (with household appliances) and the voltage swings turned out to be a problem, too.
:-(
Sounded promising back than and I was surely disappointed, when it was announced that it was not experimented with it any further.
--Mal
Now when Uncle BillyBob overloads his outlet with one too many bug-zappers and blows a transformer, he'll probably get 10-to-20 years as a "cyberterrorist."
Yes we realise that you can bundle a fiber line with a power line, that's not what this is discussing, although I am glad you are getting cheap broadband. But I think you know, because you said piggy back, this is operating a network right over your current power lines, utilizing the unused channels. I personally thought it was a great idea when I read about it 2YEARS AGO, (not exactly new /.) The issue is that, our power operates on 60 cycles per second, and this really isn't appropriate for the technology they want, now I admit they can change this at the power company with relative ease, but if you change it from 60 then you'll suddenly find that some of your house hold appliances no longer work.
I hope they work this out, I think it is a neat idea, just have two power cords for your computer, one for power, one for internet. it could eliminate the need for powered switches, for IP phones.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
Heck, you could put this together in 5 minutes. http://www.knology.net/~bburdette/ethernet-over-ac .jpg
Try it on your work network!
In the energy services field it is common to send data up the drilling fluid on a drilling rig. They use a valve downhole to modulate pressure waves up the pressurized fluid in the pipe. This gives them details of the environment at the drilling bit. They data rate is quite low.
They had this when I lived in Germany. The deal isn't that they sent a signal over the HV wires. The HV wires come into the local tranformer and get stepped down to the right voltage and smoothed out. At that point you can have a bypass to filter out the higher frequency signal that carries your packets. So from the house to the transformer you can have one set of signals riding on a normal 220 V 50 Hz (+/-) power. At the bypass, you can change the frequency so it can travel over the high voltage lines or can send it over to fiber from the tranformer to a central location. The difference between Germany and the States is that in Germany, they have a transformer that services an entire neighborhood. So you can put in the equimpent at the transformer and have potentially thousands of customers to regain the costs. In the States, there may be a neighborhood transformer, but there are also generally transformers every few houses for the final conditioning. That means expensive equipment that needs to be recouped over a small number of people.
The digital divide may have been about people who have computers versus those who don't a decade ago, or even five years ago.
With the drop in PC prices and the drop in ISP prices that's not an issue as much anymore. You don't need a 2.6 ghz rig with a gig of RAM to surf the Web, send e-mail or exchange files (NOTE: ANY ATTEMPT TO EXCHANGE MUSIC OR MOVIES WILL END WITH RABID CYBERNETIC SQUIRRELS SENT BY THE MP/RI/AA DEVOURING YOU)
The divide now is one of high-speed access. I work with computers for a living so the technological midget theory is out the window. Money is not a big issue. What is I have ZERO real options for high-speed access. With ISDN not only do they want a boatload of cash, they also want my name signed in blood on a long-term contract. DSL, too far. Satellite, hahahaaha. Cable, too far.
Let's face it. A modem connection, particularly a 26.4 kbps connection like the one that runs across my barbed-wire phone lines, just doesn't cut it anymore.
As more applications go online and Web sites continue to bloat I find myself sitting here drumming my fingers waiting. If they can pipe in some bandwidth over those big fat wires that already come into my house great. At this point I'll take just about anything..
That's nice in theory, but totally inpractical. Basically, you'd have to sync both ends of the data transmission with frequency, except that the grid frequency is not a constant, and unpredictable...
The 60Hz frequency standard in the US is a "desired" point... everything, from turning on a blender at home, to firing up your local steam generator for the morning ramp, has an effect on the grid, from a minute twitch to a big swing. If there is more demand than generation, the frequency slows down as energy is sucked out of the grid; likewise, overproduction of electricity causes the frequency to speed up. Now, it takes many many MWatts to make a change, because so many loads & generators are wired in parallel, but it's still possible.
There are many companies operating in parallel across the USA (abbreviated RTOs & ISOs) that work to balance the supply & demand of electricity every second... we track the frequency (graph here) in an attempt to balance the whole thing out, by calling on more generation when the frequency is low, and telling the to back off when it is high...
Now, as far as sending data by modulating the AC wave, the problem here is the "scrubbing" effects of Transformers. The premise behind high voltage transfer of electricity is to use transformers to step up the voltage & lowering the current. Lower current equates to less heat loss, so you can send the energy more miles for the same loss. Now, the problem is the magnetic core does not have a good frequency response when converting E to M to E again... they're designed for a low frequency after all. So, you end up with every transformer removing all of the high-freq. oscillations.