Slashdot Mirror
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 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
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.
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.
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"!