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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!"
Anyone know if they've done any work on the issues with BPL and interference on the HF bands?
I, for one, do not welcome the interference from BPL in the HF bands.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
It actually seems to work. I've seen 'demonstrations' before where it couldn't even control traffic lights.
If they're actually doing anything, it's a success, and it just needs scaling up. Even if it's a totally shared bus network, it could have _some_ uses. Just depends on what speed is available and what it's really going to cost to get hooked in.
I'd be a bit worried about the surges, though. Remember that a lightning bolt has already jumped through a mile or three (or more) of air, and blowing through your surge protector to eat your favorite game box isn't much more of a step.
Yes, I know that power systems have exactly the same problem, it's just that they're generally designed to absorb small spikes, and sometimes folks forget the modem is another route for bored electrons.
Best of luck to 'em.
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As a telecom Engineer working as a sys and network admin, this just sounds too out there to be viable. Nortel isn't one to trash a technological standard unless they've really tested it. There's quite a few issues with power spikes, power filters, etc that would seem to make this an unlikely competitor. Plus, the market is already crowded with cable, DSL, satellite, and wireless carriers (Sprint) providing WiFi ISP coverage.
there is a fair wallop more current going through the grid than cable. it would be easier to pick up EM flux - especially from telegraph pole cables.
Good point! One would hope that they have a way to keep your packets from being sniffed on the lines.
My biggest concern with this is the ammount of line noise in my house. Even a slow protocall like the one that X10 uses is full of errors (usually the type that turns my bedroom light on in the middle of the night).
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
Power loss will also mean communication loss. If a business is using broadband instead of T1, they risk losing communication in the event of a power failure. Sure, they probably have a UPS but that's not going to keep their WAN links alive.
It's very scary to think of so many things being handled by one main line.
I like BPL as an interim solution before we get fiber to our houses, but in the end I *want* three cables going into my home - power, data and voice. Note that data and voice are separate. I also like having a landline and a cell phone.
Whenever I hear about multiple utilities becoming reliant on one system of infrastructure I always think of that telco parody which starts with:
"Hello? AT&T? I seem to be having problems with my phone..."
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.
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.
It reminds me of a scam run on the US Government in the late 90's. Millions of dollars were granted to a company which had demonstrated such a system. Turns out it was nothing more than a RF modem.
As I recall, the system was immune to scrutiny in order to protect the Intellectual Property of the company.
Also... I remember several people citing the impossibility of broadband over power lines because of the interference caused by transformers on the above ground power lines. In order to enable broadband over power lines, you would have to either find a way to sustain a pure signal through the existing hardware (deemed impossible), or design and add a piece of hardware at every transformer.
I read about this in Wired if anyone cares to go searching for it. The article was entitled Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, printed at some point in 2002, but I was unsuccessful in locating the article in a brief attempt at searching their online archive.
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/
What a great opportunity for an enterprising geek to win a Darwin award by hooking his computer up to an overhead power line!
I can't WAIT to see AOL users shoving Ethernet cables into their power socket.
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Well, then perhaps soon we'll see people tapping into power lines instead of wardriving for illegal pr0n.
Seriously though... a power-line is fairly noisy and/or is accessible to the general masses, more so than a phone-line. How does one tag an ID on individual customers (a meter is generally read manually?).
If it were integrated into meters the meter-reader could be out of the job, but could people bypass the meter and pull a little fancy hackery in order to get onto the power co's network? I could see spammers and other illegal users try to take advantage of this...
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
Didn't Linksys or Netgear (or one of the other SOHO network gear mfrs) have something similar to this for LANs? I remember reading a while back about these units (basically ethernet via the wall sockets) and there seemed to be an issue regarding security. Like your neighbor being able to sniff your traffic. Would someone who knows about this mind explaining a little more? Especially on a grander scale such as is being discussed?
Does this seem scary to anyone else that these traffic lights would be internet accessible? If some script kiddies decided to have some fun, lives could be lost.
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.
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
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
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.