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FEMA Opposes Broadband Over Powerlines
Curmudgeon Rick writes "According to eHam.net, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has put a submission to the FCC strongly opposing the use of powerlines for broadband distribution. The report can be found here [PDF link]. IMO, vendors should let powerline broadband die. They keep defibrillating it only because of the dollars they poured in; but it is and always was a dead duck." The submission concludes: "FEMA has concluded that introduction of unwanted interference from the implementation of BPL technology into the high frequency radio spectrum will result in significant detriment to the operation of FEMA [emergency] radio systems such as FNARS."
Wasn't the original and best argument about this the fact that, *in most cases* when HAMS were in use for emergency communication, the power was already out?
Would this not *eliminate* said theoretical interference?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
Afterall, the HAM operators have been saying that the test markets for the current set of BPL services were generating RF trash that could interfere with various longwave services since they resided in the same spectrum. Since this is all Subpart 15 stuff, they're probably going to get told to lower the emissions to practically nothing or don't do it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
This is sad, because there are still multitudes without regional access to DSL or cable. Satellite is expensive and still uses dial-up for upstream comm. And some of those who are still using dial-up have to deal with poor line quality and congestion. Power lines exist everywhere, and have the ability to bring high-speed access to a lot of people.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Pull the plug
/.
I mean, seriously. If there's all kinds of natural/unnatural disasters happening, let the Feds disconnect access until the crisis is stabilized.
Some people may complain about freedom of the press or censorship, or some other fool thing, but when a crisis is unfolding I'm much more interested in getting information from the radio, shortwave, or scanner than I am about reading
OK...
I can do this. I am, after all,
a superhero!
Its good that FEMA advises against BPL (especially in a technical explanation). If the energy companies get their hands in broadband service . . . uh oh, we may see one of the biggest monopolies in energy.
I am one of those who live in the country. No cable, No DSL, Satelite does not allow VPN access.
I am screwed.
I was hoping service by power lines might be useful, but I guess some idiots can't think that far. As mentioned before, what about the rural, backwoods people? Satelite does have upload and download by satelite, but VPN access is not possible.
HF radio is *the* communication medium for many life-critical situations. It is the only affordable communication line for many NGOs operating in third world countries, and HF equipment is much easier to setup and more rubust than satellite equipment.
Until now, the HF spectrum has been carefully regulated to avoid harmful interference. It is just not acceptable to sacrifice it simply to get a cheaper Internet access. There are a good set of broadband technologies available which almost do not interfere with HF users.
Let's hope politicians wait to notice it until a true emergency happens...
And all that's in the short term anyway. They're having a harder and harder time getting people to get into HAM Radio. The last major influx was during the Vietnam War if I am remembering what I've heard correctly. If it's not even really feasible to enjoy the activity due to interference, there'll be less and less reason for people to become HAM radio operators, and eventually there'll be some major emergency with cell towers nonfunctional, powerlines down, phone lines down, and no one to coordinate things over the air.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
How do the people in one location know when to pull the plug? Also you have the local people mad when they loss their net access because of an emergncy, that they belive has no effect on them.
I could think about what people in a city in the US might say if they had their net access cut so that FEMA can take a call comming in from South America, the best solution is not to have people use something that would have to be pulled so that some one can recive a SOS.
If, on a normal basis, hams can't use their equipment due to interference from powerline broadband, they'll give up their hobby and you'll loose that extra layer of defense on the next emergency.
There's also the issue of interference with other users of this frequency spectrum, such as flight controllers for GA (as mentioned in the article). Like other frequency ranges, HF is very valuable and there had better be a damn good reason to screw it up and frankly VPN in rural areas doesn't cut it.
There are at least two other technologies that could let you have VPN when DSL and cable isn't available: WiFi and fixed, radio towers that I believe are in the microwave range (at least here in Boulder, although they cost nearly as much as satellite).
The best counter-argument to that is that there would be no ham radio operators if they couldn't use their equipment except for when the power's out. I mean, would you invest large amounts of time and money into getting equipment and certification for a hobby that you couldn't ever practice? Guess what -- no one else would either.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I don't think so. IMHO, in case BPL would get accepted they'd just step aside and watch this thing to die and then they would take over the BPL customers.
Iterference would be a huge problem fo HAM operators and everybody who use HF/VHF. But the thing is interference goes both ways. So I think if deployed in wide area BPL would just really really suck. You power line infrastructure was just not built to be protected from interference. Any kind of it. Even people with DSL have problem with intereference. And that's CAT3 UTP (in most places).
So for telco and cable providers BPL will just awake an apetite of more people for broadband. If you ever had broadband (however bad it was) going back to dial-up is just painfull. Most of my firends who installed and had problems with DSL just switched to cable. I don't even remember anyone of them fireing up their dial-up modem ever again.
As far as I remember for a long time ARRL was the only voice oposing to BPL.
- Back off man. I am a scientist
The economics of rural service are very interesting. Right now everyone with a phone in the USA is paying to subsidize phone access to rural residents. It costs more money to service an area with a low populations density than an urban area. Fine, people need phones for safety reasons. Rural residents presumably subsidize services they don't need, like meth clinics.
It bothers me when people start talking about subsidizing rural internet access, though. El says that "they're not even thinking about running cable" near his house, and that he'd have to shell out 10K$ to connect to said cable, anyway. I'm curious: who does he think should bear these costs? Everyone in the US?
If people want to move to the middle of nowhere to get away from gangs, traffic, comedians, literacy, and culture, that's fine. It isn't reasonable to expect the same service level in the middle of nowhere that one enjoys in New York City, though. It's especially unreasonable to regard the acquisition of these services as a right. If you want to enjoy cheap services, then move to where it is cheap to provide those services. If you want to live in an area that is difficult and expensive to service, break out your wallet.
El isn't necessarily making this argument, he just reminded me of the people I had to deal with when I worked in the rural NW.
Ok, let's rephrase that then: wouldn't it make more sense to simply require broadband over powerline to not emit any significant energy in the HF spectrum?
And while we're at it, let's require that the laws of physics be re-written by Congress! You just don't understand what we're talking about. Power lines are great for low-frequency AC (60 Hz power), but inefficient for higher-frequency signals.
The proposed Broadband over Power Lines service would be a shared user of frequencies between 2 MHz and 80 MHz. Again, these frequencies wouldn't propagate as well over power lines, so they would be sent at high power levels. Much of their energy would be lost in the transmission from the upstream connector to your home -- i.e. radiated out the miles-long antenna formed by the power line! Simply put, you CANNOT have non-interfering BPL if it uses the 2-80 MHz spectrum. Period.
FEMA and other governmental users' radios are scattered between typically 2 and 50 MHz in different sub-bands that are used depending on the time of day, how active the ionosphere is and the overall path of intended communications. Ditto for fixed services, land-mobile, aeronautical and marine services, beacons, short wave broadcasters and amateurs.
The problem is two fold:
1) anybody trying to receive a signal between about 2 and 80 MHz would be unable to do so.
2) Legally-licensed transmitters in that range would cause untold interferance to these "Part 15" devices. Part 15 means they can't legally cause interferance and must live with any interferance they get. Aunt Millie's not going to be happy when her cordless phone is rendered useless by broadband and Uncle Phil will be pissed when he can't surf porn because the clean and licensed 1000 Watt transmitter up the block is on the air.
This has to be killed and killed NOW.
Cheers, Peter, W2IRT
You realize not everything is based on conflicts of interest, right? There are legitimate technical reasons for opposing BPL. Making emergency communications satellite dependent is not a good idea. /KB1KKC
Ham Radio Operators really fear the use of power lines for broadband. Tests in Europe have shown that this kills most of the communcations in the high frequency range currently employed in the Amateur Radio hobby.
I'll add that Hams have a vital role in most emergency situations. Not too long ago I got to listen to a traffic pass from a Ham in Mexico. He was providing the Hurricane Center with to the minute live information on storm conditions right up to the point where his roof came off.
Boradband over powerlines threatens to interfear with this sort of communication.
Thanks to FEMA for the reccomendation. I hope it playes towards keeping Ham Radio alive. (Umong other things.)
-=fshalor
Emergencies do not necessarily mean there is a power outage.
Suppose the phones go down. This happened in an area where I was living when someone cut the sole long distance line in the region. Hospitals could not communicate, and family members could not check on the status of their loved ones. Hams like me carried the messages.
Emergency to a ham doesn't necessarily mean disaster, it means any situation where the normal lines of communications are disrupted.
Examples of times where Hams are used for communications even when the phone lines are up, and the power is up:
- Coordinating evacuations (fire, etc). You coordinate the evacuation of thousands with the phone system or the internet... let me know how it goes.
- Car accident in the middle of nowhere.
- Search and rescue efforts. Clicking and talking on a multi-access channel works a lot better than cell phones.
There are also communities where it is a primary method of communication. There is a place called Three Rivers here in Oregon, near Lake Billy Chinook. They do not have power, they do not have phones, matter of fact, they don't have any public utilities. There's several hundred homes, each with solar and wind power, and wells or trucked water. Some cellphone coverage is available, but not much. *Everyone* has a CB or ham radio.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
At least every couple of years someone will come along claiming to have a low/no interferance system and manage to secure a trial license from the RA only to find after the trial finishes that a full commercial license won't be granted.
This honestly surprises me.
On 9/11, the Emergency Alert System as it is now called should have been used to communicate instructions to those in the attacked areas. It could even been argued that a National Security Warning should have been issued to alert those in critical areas nationwide. During the blackout, a Civil Emergency warning should have been sent out as soon as information about what it was and was not became availible. Instead, people huddled understandably afraid in the dark wondering what was coming next and what could be happening around them.
FEMA has a point, though. They've put in a nationwide HF network for emergencies that can stay up even if other communication systems go down. So if somebody does bring down the phone system, they have backup. Someday we might really need that.
I sat thru a presentation on this by the local power company a couple years ago in the DotCom heydey. 'Why not add a fiber-optic cable' got complicated fast:
1 - vendors come in, offer to pay for the infrastructure in return for exclusive rights to it. If you refuse, they ignore your town indefinitely (AT+T did this here when they owned the local cable company). Anyone approaching these vendors about subleasing access gets quoted insane prices ($20k per month to use an existing cellphone tower for an 802.11b antenna, in one case I know of).
2 - There are restrictions on putting cables onto poles. These range from weight and rain/wind/snow load design issues to vertical/horizontal clearance restrictions. Imagine being responsible to safely/quickly work on one of 25 cables (including data, fiber, and *power!*) on a single power pole and you start to see a worst case scenario.
3 - Each new cable needs full engineering, documentation, and 24x7 support staff.
4 - Buried lines are not cost-effective to piggy-back, so areas without poles are inaccessible.
5 - These aren't communications/IT gurus that are being asked to make these infrastructure decisions. They're politicians, planning and zoning staff, and a few Electrical Engineers (Power, not computer/communications). The learning curve to doing a good infrastructure with a 25-year expected life is nasty enough without this handicap.
6 - The existing owners hate complications. Power company doesn't want the liability/hassle, or phone company doesn't want the competition.
7 - The cost of cabling, repeaters, etc: let's say roughly 100 lattice lines per square mile x the area of your city. I dunno where to even look it up but I'll estimate cable cost installed at a buck per foot. And I'll throw in ten grand per square mile to handle the electronics. That's some serious cash, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn costs were much higher.
So, it isn't that the ideas aren't out there. There are even some *more* clever devices (little fiber-retrofit robots 'stapling' the fiber to the top of sewer pipe). But it's not cheap, it's not easy, and once those two concepts (hard and expensive) join forces, it becomes risky politically. Much riskier than doing nothing.
Of course, a lot of communities just nodded gratefully when presented with option one (where the town agrees to perpetual rape-n-pillage unregulated monopolies by a single vendor). Ow! Thank god for the multiple-headed threats of: powerline broadband, dsl, cable modems, wifi, cellphone wireless, and beyond, because that keeps just enough competition in my area to hopefully nudge cost-per-gig down. Hell, I left the above meeting intensely angry about the learning of the city's agreement to one such infrastructure monopoly, since there are hundreds of local IT geeks that would have volunteered to design things to eliminate/minimize a monopoly like this.
Disclaimer: These are all 2-year-old impressions of things a bit outside my area of specific experience. Actual details may vary widely, no warranty given. But the above was enough of an eye-opener for me to give me a greater respect and fear of the last mile problem.