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Broadband Over Power Lines in Canada
Patchw0rk F0g writes "From Europe, we jump to la belle province of Quebec for the latest test of broadband internet over power lines (Real Player stream available.) Seems the utility is already utilizing the system to control traffic lights and such, and is exploring the possibilities of offering a cheaper service to consumers to compete with DSL/cable/satellite. Lower prices? I'm all for it... but I live in TORONTO!"
Swedish company Sydkraft also offers the service.
Sydkraft announced a copule of years ago that they would provide Internet over power line. Except for a small pilot project nothing ever happened.
The reality is that PLC might be technically possible, but the cost of deployment is much higher than compeeting technologies such as: ADSL, Cable Internet and Wireless Local Loop (WLL).
It seams that power companies like to run trials to test the technology, and make unrealistic press releases.
I live in Montreal, but I'm from Chicago. The prices on broadband here are a factor of two less than chicago and many places offer nice features like a static IP. In general the net is faster than I had with similar service in the states.
Bandwidth has nothing to do with the current through a line (or not much....)
A normal power line has been designed for 50hz (or 60hz) AC. A coax cable was designed for frequencies in the Mhz to Ghz range. A telephone line was designed for atleast several Khz (speach).
The dampening of a power line will be far greater than a coax cable.
The same is for shielding. A power line is very suceptable for interference from the outside and can radiate itself far more. That is why greater bandwidth (higher frequencies) will be a huge problem on these lines.
Simply put: They weren't designed for this.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
But it's to be expected, as they have the most advanced powerlines going. Remember that little blackout y'all had last Summer? As soon as the loss of power hit the Quebec border the chain reaction was stopped cold by the connections to the Quebec system. People in Ottawa could look across to the bright lights of Hull just next door. This is thanks to the massive rebuilding that was required after the 1998 ice storm. Having to transmit power from damns way up north down to the south (the longest-distance power lines in the world, i believe) also means they had to learn how to deal with the effects of solar flares on power transmission. So basically if anybody knows about the issues that affect power lines, it's these guys.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
I just got an arrl newsletter telling all of their members to contact their congressmen and tell them what a bad idea this is. Apparently, according to ARRL research, broadband over powerlines causes significant interference not just in ham bands but across the spectrum. Although I havn't exactly looked at the research in detail, I can't see how the power companies could avoid interference. Powerlines aren't shielded, and for any reasonable bandwidth to be passed through the powerlines, the frequency would have to be high enough that a significant amount of power would have to be used. Unshielded wire is always agood antenna, and for some situations the best. Granted it won't be well tuned, but I've seen worse situations cause a lot of interference. My home is near high voltage power lines (read a large part of San Francisco's power) and even at 60hz, I get interfering harmonics all the way up into 10 meters. Avoiding electrical grid contamination is something every ham has fought with. Hopefully I'm wrong, but unless there is some way of preventing interference, this seems like one of those thngs that will be really good for pacbell and really bad for the rest of the wireless world.
I think it's been mentioned here on slashdot before, but broadband-over-powerline systems have many drawbacks. Because power lines are not shielded, they will act as very effective radiating antennas for the signals they carry. Many of the proposed broadband systems utilize frequency ranges that overlap military, emergency, commercial and amateur radio bands, with the potential to cause a great deal of harmful interference to users of those services. Many countries, including Japan, the UK, and the Netherlands have already rejected broadband-over-powerline technology for this reason. Check out this page for more info:
http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/
Yeah, The ARRL (www.arrl.org) has been fighting BPL for quite some time now. If BPL is done incorrectly, it could prove to be very bad for TV, Radio (amateur and commercial), local communications, but great for cable companies and landline phone companies.
Well, I live in Quebec and Hydro-Qebec is our famous "Hydroelectricity government own company" with a reputation of doing what they announce.
:)
If they say they gona do it and they think it will work fine I have no reason to doubt their announcements.
Our Broadband services are already dirt cheap in Montreal and this can only drive them lower.
Whoo hoo!!!!
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
The fact is that even DSL causes interference, because the twisted-pair phone wires weren't designed to convey those high frequencies and leak like a sieve. Now, go to power lines, which are not twisted-pair, have no form of shielding whatsoever, and simply aren't designed for frequencies over 60 Hz. They radiate like antennas.
Traffic lights take very little bandwidth to operate, generally they are on a 200 KHz system that works like the X-10 switches many people have in their homes. It's not good for much more. The claims of greater bandwidth than cable or DSL are absurd.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
It was proposed here in DK and I remember an article stating success depends very much on the type of infrastructure already present. What kind of cables have been laid out, neutral or no neutral, etc... For all those discussing transformers and high voltage lines: this is strictly a last-mile technology: you need fiber to AFTER the last transformer! In this sense, a power failure does (theoretically) not necessarely have to bring the network down, even if the low end receivers will probably get their power from the same line as their data.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
And of course the BPL providers don't care how much they pollute the radio spectrum.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Scottish Hydro has already done this.
Here in Denmark several projects about bringing Broadband to users through powerlines has been abanded. The costs up-front for the avarage user are just to high compared to establishing an ADSL-connection.
Phone lines are twisted, so they don't tend to radiate much of the radio energy that's poured into them. HomePNA kicks out some noise but it's nothing compared to BPL.
Power lines are widely spaced, unevenly spaced, and not twisted. From the perspective of a radio signal, power lines are not transmission lines: they're antennae! BPL also works over much longer distances than HomePNA, meaning that the power levels involved are much larger. Dumping tons of RF onto the power grid will simply turn it into a massive radio jammer.
John Q. Public should be worried. In times of civic emergency, ham radio operators need all the spectrum they can get. Find a local amateur radio club and attend a meeting -- you'd be surprised how much stuff goes on behind the scenes. Hams are hobbyists, refining their equipment and honing their skills "for fun", but then swinging into action during emergencies to maintain communications when other methods fail.
Destroying a large chunk of the radio spectrum will not help anyone. BPL is technically inferior to cable and DSL, and it's only being hyped by those who see opporunity for profit without regard for technical or civic responsibilities.
The power company in iceland already has this service upp and running, www.fjoltengi.is although you probably wont understand it,
They claim a speed of 4mb/s but say that it can drop to 256kb/s at most.
Costs about $40 us a month, and only 50Gb download is included. (Inside Iceland)
then you probably have cheap enough DSL. There are 66 DSL providers, according to Canadian ISP. I don't know how much cheaper than $20 CDN (that's about $15 USD) you can expect. You can expect to pay $30 CDN for higher-than-average speeds (1700kb/s down, 300kb/s up), and/or no caps. Let's see power line internet beat that.
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
-Off Topic Reply ghideon-
What stops HomePlug signals cold is the step-down transformer. In the US there is an average of 4 homes per transformer where you are potentially sharing a connection. Better than wireless, and the software utility lets you count how many nodes can see you. Regarding HomePlug intentional security, there is 56-bit DES built into every HomePlug chip. This is used to create logical networks with a Network Password that works sort of like a workgroup or an SSID. (HomePlug members are not releasing "sniffers" so if you can crack DES-56, you won't get a channce.)
The main electricity companies in Spain are already given service or close to do it (depending on the company) on cities like Zaragoza, Barcelona or Sevilla.
Article in spanish here and Babelfish translation to english here.
February 18, 2003
Nothing makes me more suspicious than old, recycled news pretending to be new news and released under weird circumstances. In this case, I'm referring to the recent "news" about power-line networking. This, in fact, is a technology I've been hearing about for 20 years. Its strange and sudden promotion by the government is ominous.
Old technology. It began on January 16 with an Associated Press article reporting that federal officials (the FCC) think that power-line networking "may become the next pathway into homes for high-speed Internet access." On what planet?
This piece ran in The Washington Post and on most major news outlets. Five days later, TechTV reported the same story without questioning the source or the rationale for the idea's reemergence.
This non-news is obviously being orchestrated by some of the companies involved in the technology. Who can blame them? But why is the FCC suddenly on the bandwagon?
Phony rationale. The new angle is that power lines can provide an alternative way to connect to the Internet in a national emergency. Has anyone noticed the simple fact that during most disasters, the first things to go off-line are power lines, not phone lines? Something else is going on.
I've always been baffled by the continued development of power-line networking when all network engineers know that power-line noise is not conducive to data flow. Set up a home network over power lines and see how well it operates when Betsy cranks up her 1,500-watt hair dryer or Dad turns on the blender. Filtering all this noise is difficult, which is the main reason that power-line networking has gone nowhere. There are reports of stable 1-Mbps and even 10-Mbps systems, but all the network engineers I talk to are suspicious of any such claims. We have wireless technology, mesh concepts, and Ethernet-to-the-home initiatives. Why does development continue with power-line networking?
The reality. The idea of a personal Internet connection over power lines is preposterous, since other technologies are clearly better and more stable. The real reason to promote power-line networking is so the appliances of the future can be monitored and controlled from remote locations.
Imagine that you own a Maytag washer with an LCD screen. It's got an IP address and is plugged into the electrical system where it communicates with a Maytag server on the Web. One day, the machine's LCD tells you that you can download a new spin cycle by hitting the red button on the washer. Meanwhile, the LCD also tells you that the Safeway down the street (of course, the washer knows where you live) is having a sale on Tide detergent. The washer asks you whether you want the coupon mailed to you or printed via your Canon printer right now. You tell it to print the coupon now. The Maytag server immediately contacts the Canon server, your power-line network talks to the IP-addressable printer in your home office, and the coupon is printed. Maytag pays Canon 2 cents for this service. Welcome to our new wired world.
This has always been the reason for power-line networking. Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy and IBM were openly discussing idiotic Internet appliances such as a coffeemaker you can call from your car to make coffee or a washing machine that can call a repair person. How was that supposed to happen without power-line networking? Did anyone expect a coffeepot to have an Ethernet jack and wires running all over the kitchen?
Big Brother. The potential for abuse bothers me. Can you imagine every plug in the house being a TCP/IP connection? Consider how easy it would be to slip a little device with a microphone or camera inside the wall socket to spy on you or to put a camera inside any appliance, clock, or light fixture. Even without cameras and microphones, you could figure out what was going on inside a home by monitoring the ports for electrical activity. "Someone's using a crock pot in the kitchen."
The possibility for snooping here seems a lot
Broadband over power lines (PLC, Power Line Communications as we call it) is also being offered in Turku, the former capital of Finland.
There has been quite a lot of resistance due to PLC possibly interfering short wave radio signals and other electric devices nearby. That has made radio amateurs and DX listeners talk against this in the publicity. However, the service in Turku seems to be operating pretty well.
hapo
actually, the things that happened were much sooner than that. Back in the bad old days of S. 100 bus systems, there was significant interference to radio and television. If there was a computer turned on, FM radios and over the air television was useless. The FCC stepped in and required certification for emissions levels. As result you'll now find on every piece of gear some form of class A or B certification listing. As result, there is very little interference no matter what CPU frequency. Assuming of course, you can keep the top on ;-)
x10 is very low-frequency control signals. Below the range of most receivers. Not so with the case of BPL. It uses spectrum from roughly 1 MHz all the way up through 80-100 MHz. As others have pointed out, it also has the problem that if something radiates, it can also receive which means any user of the HF spectrum like aircraft and military can easily interfere with BPL
It has been trialled enough times around the world with no critical mass of market share that like the video-telephone it will not successfull ever.
A large scale roll out will more likely than not generate unacceptable (according to existing law, of unlicensed and in this case unintended radiators) intereference with various licensed spectrum users including government, military, and amateur voice and data communications.
BPL is insane! Everywhere they a pilot project has been done it was shown that there is significant RF noise to interfere in huge chunks of radio spectrum. Whomever thought up the brilliant idea to transmit RF via unbalanced unshielded wire over the power grid should be... (I will leave medieval torture methods to your imagination)...
Several things come to mind. Most cable systems provide seperate feeds to local areas, usually using a broadcast protocol I believe, with one feed linked to one server.
Also our local cable (Chicago area) came around and knocked on the door, they had to go around and check for RF leakage. I had a segment of my internal distribution that was not up to spec and radiated too much. They changed that part of the system and brought the emissions back in line with the specifications they had to operate under.
There is an issue with frequency/channel capacity and length of cable. The data we send is square waves which can be thought of as actually an infinite series of sine waves added together to give you the square wave shape. So square waves are rich in harmonics, and those different frequencies actually travel along the wire at slightly differnt speeds, which fuzzes the signal out over a distance. Like ethernet cables have an effective maximum length of what is it 100 ft or so for good signal quality.
So for pure data you need to put repeaters inline over distance to re-generate the signal. For long hauls you modulate the signals with a purer tone but still you have to detect the transistions which slows down your effect speed.
So the claim that it could be 5 times faster than cable makes little sense.
With the powerlines you have one fairly connected system that it would be hard to seperate out segments
to balance the load for one ethernet segment. You have a problem when you have too many people contending for the the broadcast time.
I suspect they the scheme is really, like DSL just an end point distribution system like dsl or cable, just tapping into local isolated segments of the power to provide ethernet segment access to households.
I live under one of the flight paths to Ohare airport. I would hate to think the lighting up the grid with internet traffic could land one of those jumbo jets on my roof.
The catch is there is no correct way to do BPL. Every where it has been tried it failes.
99% of over 4,500 comments to the FCC strongly oppose BPL spectrum poluttion
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A very diverse range of corporations, organizations, associations, groups and citizens have filed comments that urge the FCC to ensure that BPL interference does not pollute our radio spectrum.
The small number of comments supporting BPL have been from Power Companies looking for quick profits at the expense of turning our American radio spectrum into an electronic version of Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers)
http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/re
National Academy of Sciences (BPL will severely disrupt Radio Astronomy)
http://svartifoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/
Wireless Communications Association (BPL could disrupt Wireless Internet access)
http://svartifoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/ret
North American Shortwave Association
http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/r
Sprint (the leading cell phone company)
http://svartifoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/re
ARRL (Represents 700,000 American radio amateurs)
http://svartifoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/r
National Association of Broadcasters (Folks that own the TV and Radio stations)
http://svartifoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/r
National Association of shortwave broadcasters
http://svartifoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecf
Amateur Radio operator (typical of over 1,500 citizen comments)
http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/ret
Aura communications (leading Wireless research company)
http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retr
Amherst Alliance (citizen advocacy group)
http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrie
Phonex (leading manufacturer of power line equipment)
http://svartifoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/
REC Networks (dedicated to promoting diversity and culture through communication)
http://svartifoss2.fcc.gov/prod/e
Pulsar Technologies (supplies communication equipment to the power utilities)
http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/re
Amateur radio operator (who is also a Sheriff)
http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retr