Internet via the Power Grid, Again

Damon Campagna writes "This NYT article, Internet via the Power Grid: New Interest in Obvious Idea says the FCC is looking into power-line networking again. I thought this was pretty much debunked a couple years ago?"

Comments

Re:Power Grid

[gobbo]

The primary difference in the ease of deploying IP over A/C is with the differing electrical infrastructure in NorthAmerica as opposed to the U.K. (and possibly other regions, don't know about that). In N.A. transformers were put all over the place in such a way that it presents a significant problem for getting a clean signal all the way down the line.

Re:Redundant

[SerpentMage]

Speak for yourself guy. You know there are a large number of people who cannot get Cable or DSL... These people are stuck, with well 56K. This would be wonderful if it actually worked. BTW I am talking from a place that is 15 KM from a DSL and Cable connection. 15 KM, not 100 KM or 200 KM, but 15KM and nothing has changed in five years!!!!

Re:It works

[jc42]

Yeah, and it's in limited use in the US. It does require a fairly clean power system that doesn't mess up the imposed RF signal, including not "cleaning up" the power by filtering the RF signal out. And it requires that all your electronic gear have power supplies that do filter out the RF signal (or a device that does it that's plugged into the wall outlet). I've worked in a couple of development labs where we did exactly this. But these requirements pretty much rule it out for most commercial power systems.

But the main evidence that the story was about a con job was the quote

By piggybacking on this magnetic field, instead of on the electricity itself, he could obtain almost limitless speeds of transmission. [emphasis from the article]

This clearly implies cluelessness. Now, you might not expect a manager type to understand what's wrong with this statement. But you'd expect that they'd have some EEs on their payroll, and an EE's basic reaction to such a statement would be to snicker and say "Yeah; right."

Any manager who continues saying such things after a few minutes discussing it with their EEs is clearly involved in a con, and knows it. In his next con, he's gonna market a truck that doesn't damage the roads like other trucks do. His explanation will be that trucks do their damage by harming the base that the road is built on. But his trucks only drive on the surface of the road, so they won't damage the roadbed at all.

(Hmmm ... Maybe I shouldn't suggest that. Someone will decide it's a good idea, take out a patent, and start marketing it ...)

Yeah, you can transmit data by piggybacking it on power lines. But making it work on a legacy power system is gonna be expensive. Ripping out the system and building a new one would probably be cheaper in many (if not most) existing systems.