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Earthlink Invests In Broadband Over Power Lines
prostoalex writes "Earthlink dedicated $500,000 to delivering broadband connections over power lines by launching a test drive of the technology with Progress Energy in North Carolina. 500 homes involved in the projects can sign up for promotional pricing of $20/month, which after 3 months will be changed to $50/month. No word on bandwidth provided, but Ambient Corp., which provides technology for the project and accpeted EarthLink investment, claims data rates exceeding 10 Mpbs."
the FCC will have to mandate retrofiting the powerlines with some sort of sheilding.
by the time this gets to most people, it will cost 70 bucks a month I bet.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
actualy, they send the warnings because the cost of supporting 1% of the users who use 70% of the bandwidth is to much and interfears with the other 99% of users.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I add "...to Provider's nearest host".
In my town great most providers advertise like this. They just install ethernet lines between people's houses. And then say, 500 customers, each on 10 mbit line are all plugged into one 1mbit line connecting with the rest of the world.
Yeah, transfers like 1KB/s are quite common.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Well here we go again, the same old argument : ham is old, Innurnet is shiny and better, so screw the hams. I'll sum up the arguments why hams should have their bands untouched by BPL (or any other interference for that matter):
/. and I don't want to bore you all.
- Hams are useful to the community : they do aviation security radio watches, can relay messages from people at sea, and are often the last communication medium when all else fail. You don't believe me and that's normal, because it's never happened to you (or me, I'm too young). But I bet resistant fighters during WW2 really did appreciate, for example.
- There are a lot of great technical advances that were made by hams, playing and experimenting on their allocated bands. To deny them the bands just so you can d/l pr0n in the middle of Alabama means to deprive the entire scientific and technical community of these discoveries.
- Hams have been using their slices of the spectrum for decades, and had to work and pay for the privilege. In short, if nothing else, I'll say we were here first, and so we do have some rights in the matter.
There are many other reasons why ham bands should be left alone, but this is
73 de F8EJF
With one exception I have no problem with this post. In the past other hobbies and entire industries have fallen to "progress", and it will happen in the future.
However, in the case of hurricanes, earthquakes, etc a major form of communication is amateur radio. If those airwaves are messed up by interference, we lose that blessing.
I'd say the responsibility belongs with those bringing about Internet over powerlines to come up with a solution to stepping on so many frequencies.
A solution may not be cheap or easy, but it is absolutely necessary if they want to continue.
I just moved from the very area they are test-marketing this in. Maybe it's not too late to move back...
/me calls his old boss
If there's an earthquake or hurricane, the power lines will probably not be conducting electricity, so amateur radio would still work.
About how it has already caused 2 machines to become molten bricks of plastic. I know because I had to talk to one of the 2 customers.
Replacement list:
1. Wooden desk (burned)
2. Computer/Monitor (charred)
3. Everything that was in their office. (toasted)
The project will be beta for a long time. They just did all this because they wanted to get people talking and maybe buying stocks (which I have too much of). Why am I posting this...because when people from india show up around my cube all of a sudden, I know I am on the endangered outsource to do list.
But as other have pointed out in the past, if those frequencies don't work NORMALLY, there won't be a population of hams, in the area, trained up and ready to go, in the event of an emergencies. Ham radio isn't somthing you can put away for a number of years, pull out of the closet, and dust off. If nothing else, as older hams pass on, there won't be any new operators, because there won't be any reason to pursue ham radio as a hobby.
Before they get to US airspace (12 miles) they'll be able to communicate via VHF (which has a range of 134 miles from 40k feet up).
It's a shame that this is being done with Earthlink, the company that cranks DSL and cable "inlimited users" news feed connection down to next to nothing if you dare use more that 1 gigabyte in a month.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Mhh how many informations will fly through the city on radio frequences? Isnt too easy to catch them? I mean the amount of credit card numbers flying isnt a problem as long as they are encrypted but there are still plain-text user/pass combinations, and especially e-mails are mostly sent plain-text (how many of you actually uses SSL for mails?) Maybe i didnt get exactly how it works but it looks to me pretty unsafe, i remember when i had one those little "walkie talkie", a very old one and i could catch many communications this way.
DSL doesnt have to cap like cable modems, Its not as much of a shared resource. My friend in Japan is already getting 40Mbps DSL. After market saturation, ISP's will offer more speeds and services. Also with 10Mbps you can offer video on demand, another way for small towns to make a profit.
Bandwidth is the greatest overpriced product besides soda pop and breakfast cereal.
BTW, I won't use a cable modem for an un-aceptable usage policy. Don't see why people would save 5 bux for a high ping, limited service that cable service offers. If its your only choice then yes. Of course, I'm a sys-admin, and expect a little more out of my IP service provider, upload speed, real unlimited service, non-blocked ports, allowed to run servers. Speakeasy offers a sys-admin package just for that reason.
There are several factors that the BPL industry isn't mentioning:
- Even low-power, in-band transmissions can completely shut down BPL for a mile radius or more. Wonder what happens when I fire up my (FCC licensed) KW on 20 meters for a weekend-long contest?
- BPL is for overhead transmission lines. Burried lines don't have near the capacity but ARE better on interference.
- The bandwidth mentioned for BPL is STDM shared in the same way as cable modem service. YMWV
- Last, BPL operates as an unlicensed part 15 service. All part 15 users are liable to accept ANY and ALL interference from licensed services and must cease use of a part 15 device that causes interference to a licensed service. This passes ALL interference problems off to the end-user.
Turn it off NOW or go to jail...
WB1GOT
I think the original post got it wrong. The Progress/Earthlink test is using Amperion not Ambient.n ews/articl e.asp?id=8362
http://www.progress-energy.com/aboutus/
I'd love to see how 5+ MHz signals in power lines translates to changes in the audio frequency bands.
Well if the power lines go down you won't have power to run your computer.
I'll be busy looting while the geeks sit in their basements waiting for the internet to come on.
-The internet is useful to the community, and with widespread broadband, could be even more useful.
-There are lots of great technical advances made by internet users. To deprive people the bands so a tiny minority can putz around on it deprives the entire scientific and technical community of these discoveries.
-We, the people, own the spectrum, and let you use it. Your rights in the matter end at your right to vote.
There are many other reasons why ham bands should be given to more useful purposes.
"impact to the emergency services provided by amateur radio."
Very businesslike, this is a way to look at that:
Basically, the interference should not be so high that a lot of Hams quit. It doesn't really matter how much interference there is, as long as the Hams still actively pursue their hobby, because when there is a need for those emergency services, the power lines and their interference will likely be down. Otherwise, the internet-over-power would still be working....
So, for example, if the interference reduces the range of useful communications, then the amateur radio emergency services will not be impacted as long as the range is still enough for the Hams to get please out of their hobbies. When the power lines go dead, the interference goes with it, and the range is back to normal.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
"Such as the fact that power market is regulated and comunications market is not."
Whaddyamean, the communications market is not regulated? What does the FCC do then? And what are those taxes on my phone bills for?
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
They're not using the spectrum, they're trampling it. Those frequencies they're blasting are still officially designated for other uses. Look at it this way: What if the water company came up with a way to transmit data using pressure waves in the water mains, but the side effect was that water would leak out of the joints in the mains under the street and create hundreds of sinkholes in the road, rendering the road useless. Is their right to deliver internet-over-watermain so important that they should be permitted to ruin road transportation anywhere they put this in service?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
When (not if) your local nuke plant is the target of some terrorist group and your computer is only good for a paper weight I bet you wish that you had a local radio operator still interested in the hf band to see if your mom, brother, son, or daughter was still alive.
Taking this a step further to explain, since it -is- the only part of spectrum that bounces off the ionosphere, why in the heck should it be used for something that doesnt need distance propagation? If we're going to make the argument that the spectrum should be used in some other fashion (which i wholeheartedly DISAGREE with), then by god make long distance broadband 802.11ZZZ or some junk, why waste it on a technology that it is unnecessary for. Tons of communication methods depend on ionospheric propagation, BPL could use some other frequency range, or BPL could just never come to fruition and use some other means. This is about waste, about options, about ignorance, and about forgetting a community that donates millions of dollars and man hours to hopefully saving your life someday. Just because ham spectrum is free to use, and people have fun using it doesnt mean it is necessarily a hobby though some people use it as that. Is open source coding a hobby? Ham is the open source of the communications world. All of you who realize that truely innovative and novel software can come from open source should see that ham radio is the same thing for communications technology. The radio waves are the medium to test the new technology. While yes some old codgers collect old radios and such, ham is on the frontlines of innovation. To forget the past is to not understand the future. Those who keep track of old gear are honoring tradition, as well as the evolution of technology and understanding where it came from to better understand how to get to the next level. And hey, while I'm at it, when has open source saved your life? At least ham radio will get you to safety.
A buddy of mine (who's a cameraman) gave me the "your speaker cables aren't the same length" line the other day when my bargain-basement DVD-ROM drive and mplayer decided to garble the audio playing a DVD. I almost looked-up the speed of electrical propagation in copper and gave him a lecture but decided to say "you may be right" instead.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"