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."

Comments

Too bad though...

[HMA2000]

It was a strange and most likely unworkable technology but I was looking forward to having a 3rd industry in the broadband game.

Interference?

[ActionPlant]

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,

Re:Oh well..

[DrEldarion]

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....

Come on!

[El]

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?