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Rewriting Rules on Delivery of the Internet
mathin writes "A recent NYTimes (free reg required) article states that, 'The Federal Communications Commission began writing new rules today that officials and industry experts said would profoundly alter both the way the Internet is delivered and used in homes and businesses.' Things under consideration: broad band over electrical wires and VoIP. A little thin on details, but interesting none the less."
And don't forget Marc Majcher's nytview page. It works well if you RTFM.
-ted, waiting for the inevitable replies about "who cares if they require you to register!" and "big companies are evil!" and "who cares if it isn't goatse!"
The FCC's talking about powerline broadband. Yeah, we're nowhere close to a commercial rollout yet, but at least the regulators are certifying that the plans won't cause massive harm to any other communications tech, so they're about to sign off on it.
Have we just completely forgotten the problem of BPL totally killing HAM radio?
Just some background information for you to read.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Yet another case of neophyte biz-marketeers turning geek-jargon into bizwords. "Broadband" is only the width of the channel, "throughput" is more important. Also, "baud" is not necessarily a "bit" ("baud" is one packet of signal waveforms in linear combinations of FSK/PSK/ASK etc in a unit-time), etc. etc.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
As previously covered at Slashdot here... The Federal Emergency Management Agency submitted comments to the FCC stating their desire to not see BPL go into widespread implementation. Apparently it interferes with high frequency radio transmissions which are used by FEMA and others (think HAM radio operators). You can see FEMA's comments and a FAQ on the objections (slanted towards the HAM radio operators) here Forgot to add that in these post-9/11 times, it will be interesting to see who wins, Dept. of Homeland Security and their paranoia over infrastructure or the free-market wheelers and dealers at the FCC who think regulation is for the birds.
The FCC's talking about powerline broadband. Yeah, we're nowhere close to a commercial rollout yet, but at least the regulators are certifying that the plans won't cause massive harm to any other communications tech, so they're about to sign off on it.
Depends what you mean by "commercial roll-out". It's commercially available in my area, though it's still a pilot program.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Who do you think responds to FEMA when they need communications assistance?
RACES and ARES groups.
Who supports the Salvation Army with communications for shelters and medical assistance?
SATERN and ARES.
Amateur radio is not some antiquated spark-gap device. Providing live, on-scene video feeds of disaster areas; establishing ad-hoc RF computer networks over tens to hundreds (to thousands, if need be) miles to transfer data and images; communicating damage reports to take load off of the public service frequencies; providing primary site-to-site links between emergency operations centers and site command posts (often with agencies that do not use compatible communications equipment)...
The list goes on indefinitely. If you think amateur radio is something antiquated...you are way, way behind the times.
Jim kc0lpv
Those hams who responded to the NY attack did what RACES/ARES/SATERN hams (among others) train to do: they provided vital communications links for search & rescue, for disaster command posts, for health and shelter organizations, and for health/welfare traffic.
Rubbernecking is not the same thing as reporting and serving. The emergency service portion of amateur radio had its largest scale emergency response that day, and performed admirably.
Other instances where ham radio has provided very important service:
Every major hurricaine;
The Colorado/West Coast wildfires;
The Columbia accident response.
If it wasn't an essential service, we wouldn't be part of the emergency planning on the local, state, and federal levels. Officials are going so far as to encourage more people to get licensed: Read here.
Jim kc0lpv
Umm, just because power is out locally doesn't mean no interference..the frequencies concerned are in the H.F. band, which is approx. 2-30 mhz. The point being is that those frequencies travel a _long_ way. That's the whole point of long-range H.F. radio. You can use a transmitter in the tenths of a watt (0.1) range to communicate hundreds or thousands of miles.
An operational grid even on the other coast would prevent radio communications. Makes me wonder how that will work with the treaties we have with other countries.
Given lots and lots of powerline comms in the US and elsewhere, the rms sum of (in this case inadvertently) radiated interference is likely to be much greater than a few thousand CB sets all transmitting at once. The point is that HF communications will be disrupted worldwide (not all the world all the time, but some of the world some of the time) by attempts at abusing power lines in this way. Those who are behind these schemes are either ignorant (probably true if they are managers, or software engineers), or are wilfully ignoring the ionosphere.
Attempts have been made to use this technology in the UK, amateur radio and other things were wiped out locally, and doubtless at some great distance according to the prevailing conditions. I suspect that they measured interference up to some distance (a few miles?) from the source, and forgot all about the ionosphere. These tests also violated UK law about the amount of noise allowed on power lines (the signals are noise to legitimate spectrum users).
This must be stopped, or a large part of the electromagnetic spectrum will be gone for ever. It is in any case a very inefficient way to provide data communications. any progressive regime would be insisting on running fibre optics to every home or office. In the UK, BT (who had money at the time, and were ready and willing to run a fibre into every home) wanted to do just that some years ago, but the vile Mrs. Thatcher, allegedly a scientist, blocked it because it would give BT a monopoly. True, it would have, for a while, except that it could easily have been handled the same way as BT's copper wires now, via FRIACO, where other providers can get access. Of course the vile old hag had insufficient imagination to forsee that possibility, and in any case where networks and other large physical things are concerned, a monopoly, at least in any locality, is necessarily much more efficient. We could have had fibre 20 years ago (BT led the way in low-loss fibre) but for a singularly incompetent and particularly vile old bag. (Technology moves on, but a fibre good for 100MHz or more would not need replacing for a long time, even if the bits on each end were upgraded from time to time.) The same nasty piece of work also legislated to prevent mast sharing by the mobile networks (anti-competitive....) although our BBC and independent TV networks, in fierce competition, had efficiently shared transmitter sites for decades.
20 years later, I am still waiting, and have been for 3 years now, for NTL to make my cable TV bi-directional. They have done half the job, providing a digital set top (actually set bottom in most cases) box, with a network socket on the back, and increasing the rental, but they have not done the street cabinet or its links to the outside world yet. That evil old piece of malice has set the UK back about 20 years, almost as much damage as Bill Gates has done.
The moral of all this is that politicians who profess to have been scientists or other similar professionals were in fact failures in their earlier carreer, understand less than nothing about technology, and are utterly unfit to make any decision about anything of real importance. I fear this issue will be decided by some similarly incompetent piece of nastiness (although in the US the Unelected Warmongering Retard is likely to be demonstrably unelected this time), and teh damage will be done.