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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."
It was a strange and most likely unworkable technology but I was looking forward to having a 3rd industry in the broadband game.
I would have thought that the power lines themselves would generate much more interference than the data lines.
I really am curious. I can see the logic behind opposing interference, but I was of the impression that broadband would be transmitted at a very different frequency. If they do the math right, the waves really shouldn't interfere with each other.
But I'm not as informed as I'd like to be. If they DON'T use powerlines (that's a lot of wasted money) what are our other options?
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
Looks like FEMA played the National Security Card. With all the things that have been said about BPL, this, I think is one of the most impressive reasons not to have BPL. But it does raise the question, in the event of an emergency which would require the use of the those frequencies, would the lines even be up? Then again, I can see that if it interfers with the Civil Air Patrol, it would be reason enough.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
Moral of the story: If you want a fast internet connection, don't live in the middle of nowhere.
Joking aside, a lot of the time it just isn't practical to get broadband out to people in certain areas. Besides sattelite (which is far from perfect, lots of latency and slow upload), it's really not worth it for these companies to put the infrastructure in place to serve the few amount of people that would use it.
If they could make extremely-long-range wireless, though... I'd love to be able to just run around anywhere and have a constant high-speed monthly-charge connection to my laptop. Mmm....
I have a rural property that's too far from the switching office to get DSL, and they're not even thinking about running cable (but if they did, I'd have to pay ~$10,000 to run the cable from the property line to the house.) They're doing everything they can to discourage ISDN use (e.g. charging a $200 connection fee), and even POTS dial-up won't connect at better than 28.8. My viable choices for broadband are wireless or power line (I even have my own transformer). I wish they would hurry up and support one or the other. All the wireless broadband trials seemed to have concluded they couldn't make any money and have been discontinued. What are we supposed to do, all move to the city if we want decent internet access?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
The RF spectrum is already heavily polluted, it would be nice to keep data transmissions off powerlines (each powerline acts as a huge antenna).
Seems to me that you can still use the powerline infrastructure a bit for providing Internet connectivity. Why not run your fiberoptics alongside the power t-lines?
Up here (Canadian north) there are some power utilities that are installing optical data lines on top of power lines anyway for the purpose of remote sensing & monitoring. Maybe a power utility could install extra fiberoptics while they're at it, use a small percent of the bandwidth for monitoring and sell the rest of the bandwidth to telecom for providing internet service?
It seems that FEMA only uses a limited set of frequencies. Why not install notch filters at select access points and design the broadband to only use the remaining bandwidth (either in frequency space or via notch-resistant error correction protocols in the physical layer). The same could be done for ham radio users -- bandpass filtering outside the traditional X-meter bands used by SW radio operators.
Broadband use of powerlines does not have to create a broadband noise source.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
...why doesn't putting a signal over a power line act like a big antenna? Are powerlines normally shielded? It would seem like the interference transmitted to radio/tv/wireless equipment would be overwhelming, not merely annoying, and it would seem that interference *from* outside sources would also affect the network link. In addition, is the signal affected by step-down transformers, or do they bypass it somehow?
Aside from the service issues in rural communities and the express desire for more competition in the broadband market, why would anyone want broadband via power lines? Its not like we have reliable power in the United States when you factor in all the surges and spikes our household electrical equipment experience on a daily basis. Do the powerline "modems"/adapters have built in surge suppression? Are they made of metal? Because if not, if a major surge goes through your house, the adapter would melt the plastic and set fire to your house. After all, that is how Reggie Jackson lost his classic car collection. And if power lines lose 33% of the electricity that is transmitted, what does that translate to in terms of data loss? Perhaps if the power companies wish to increase their profits, they'd invest in better cabling so more efficient power transmission would occur.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
There is a difference between the HomePlug home powerline LAN solutions for running in your house and running broadband from the power company to all homes connected to its lines to form a WAN.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
IMO the telco's and cable providers are probably more worried about this than anyone and they've probably filled FEMA up with all kinds of bull about what it might do to fema's spectrum.
Of course the FCC should test anything and give it a license which means it cant interfere with anyone elses equipment and FEMA's equipment is supposed to accept any interference. Either way this story is moot and FEMA needs to get their own experts that are not paid by the opposition to formulate their own studies and opinions on the matter.
Of couse this is Pennsylvania, where we are all supposed to have already.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
So when your farmhouse gets hit by a tornado, you don't mind that there will be no way of contacting the outside world? That the ham radio operator trying to raise the emergency coordination center is having his signal squashed by the BPL system?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Voice Over IP over Broadband over powerlines?
VoIP over BPL requires:
1) a power line which is operational
2) two appropriately configured powerline switches/modems/whatever-they're-called (one at each end) to multiplex network traffic onto the appropriate wavelength of the power line, and both of these must also be operational
3) an IP router at the power station to route the IP traffic onto the appropriate IP backbone, which also must be operational
4) an IP-ready phone, or an ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter) and a regular phone, both of which must also be operational
So you're already depending on four or five fairly complex electrical devices for your communications channel, and a lot of them are at remote stations not under your control. And this to you is a "a more reliable communication medium" than an HF transmitter, a single electrical device that just requires a big-ass battery, electromagnetic radiation that's already present in the air, and someone listening on the receiving end? You'll pardon me if I pass on your suggestion for an emergency communications system.
(For what it's worth, I use Vonage over my cable connection and I love it's flexibility and price, but even though my cable modem, router, switch, ATA and phone are all on battery back-up devices, I have no intention of ever depending on Vonage for an emergency service. For one thing, VoIP services still can't connect you directly to a real emergency dispatcher.)
The most likely evolution of broadband is cellular broadband being implimented on a wide scale once the majority of the UHF spectrum goes back to the FCC (currently sometime in 2007...I think)...
The cellular companies will get a huge chunk of the old UHF spectrum, and most likely they will start going into the broadband ISP business. It only makes sense.
As mobile technology becomes the norm (more and more ppl are using laptops) they will demand wireless connectivity. This has the 2-fold benefit of bringing affordable broadband to rural areas (99% of rural areas have cellular coverage...your little handheld phone might not get a signal, but a stationary antenna would)...as well as always-connect broadband for mobile computing...
There's a new group of consumers that are just around the corner...these are the young kids (just getting into Jr. High right now) that have grown up with the internet and have never known a world without a computer with a global network connection. They are a lot like "geeks/nerds" in the way that they CRAVE information...they want to be connected 24/7 and they want it now!!! This isn't something that's going away and as soon as these kids start getting paychecks they're going to be driving the technology industry into new directions...
The power levels of current BPL demonstration projects are so high in the local area that they over ride all but the most powerful signals. This has been confirmed by actual reception tests. Often all that can be heard are the 10 KW (thousand watt) shortwave stations; and they are noisy even then. The companies that are wanting to deploy BPL want even higher power levels than are currently allowed by FCC Part 15 regulations.
Another problem is that high frequency radio transmission as low as 100 watts can wipe out the BPL signals.
These two cannot survive together. Wideband digital transmissions have other mediums that they can use: optical fiber, coaxial cable, shielded twisted pairs, twisted pairs, microwave frequecies. There is only ONE high frequency radio environment.
BPL is just a non-starter.
"Someone skilled in the art"!
I agree with you about QRP -- I keep thinking I'm going to find time to get a QRP rig put together one of these days, although the block there is the antenna (the lower your power, the more efficient your antenna needs to be). I also want to try PSK31, which from what I understand is usable at QRP levels and below.
As for SWL, though, that's a tough one. Many countries have found that they just don't have the resources to broadcast to a United States which is in general indifferent to their international services' existence and have moved over to systems like Realaudio. That's not to say that this couldn't turn into a listening disaster in Europe, where shortwave is still very much in use, or in places like rural Africa or South America where stations could be made unlistenable by a BPL version of a DDoS attack.
The US needs to keep in mind that, even though we're big, we're not the only country out there, and there are some decisions we make that have repercussions in the rest of the world.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Instead of hampering hams with BPL, why not encourage and support IPoHR (IP over ham radio?). I'd bet with enough tweaking, modulation schemes could provide fairly decent bandwidth to rural areas via ham, which could be wire-distibuted locally. Even better, get some folks to setup 'time share' systems.
Let's get the hams involved, and provide incentive to 'make it work', which they already have a history of doing. I'd betcha there is more than one ham-fisted-geek out there who wants to build a ham-IP gateway.
I recall reading something about this in the dim, dark, past...but I'm too lazy to google it.
I don't know how much raidation a BPL system would throw out, but the Amateur's Antenna Rule is that the higher the antenna and the more wire you put into it, the better it is.
Not 100% true.
The best antenna is the one on top of a mountian with high gain and 3 inches of coax between it and the transmitter.
MOST of your signal is lost in the coax run from the transmitter to the antenna unless you use extremely expensive coax cable. I recently bought some for $12.00 a foot and it was a steal at that price! (heliax hardline 2" 52 ohm with Connectors.) to gain only 5 DB on transmit AND recieve that I was losing with flexible high end coax.
when you are dealing with signals that are a microvolt you certianly don't want some government approved interference being transmitted by the world's largest antenna array (electrical grid).
Plus ignore emergency communications... Moonbounce communications would become useless... Transmit at the moon with 1500 watts into a 20 DB gain antenna Array and only get a little signal barely audible above the noise floor back. or amateur radio astronomy? (yes it is easy with a throw away 20 foot dish in your back yard.)
If the power lines were shielded I wouldn;'t have a problem, but the FCC screams bloody murder at the Cable TV companies if they have even the slightest leak, why does everyone even think that this gigantic interference maker would ever see the light of day?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Huh. In France, they've got powerline broadband and I haven't heard of problems. Probably in other EU countries, as well. Is this foot-stamping on the part of FEMA? Is there really no way to work it out? Maybe not... I'm just bitter about paying $40/mo for a 2Mb/512Kb connection.
Understand the comments however, think that they are being pushed by the old guard, note used to be into Amatuer Radio at High School, know Valve Theory@#$%@#, but the reality is that in many places there is no network other than a power grid, the development of PLC is going to be very important for the global rollout of broadband. About 14% have telephony but about 40% have power. RF issues are being dealt with, and even in the USA with great Broadband optiosn, many regions will only have a powernetwork for potential broadband, which I see as another long haul alternative, rather than trying to lay fibre, which is not econmically viable in many areas, of low population density.