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Cincinnati Gets Broadband Over Power Lines
kotj.mf writes "According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, Cincinnati-area electric utility Cinergy has become the first electric utility in the country to offer broadband over power lines. There's also a press release. At $29.95/month for 1 Mb/s both upstream and down, it's only a few bucks more than the local dialup providers. Can we expect the power companies to start giving Cable and DSL providers a run for their money? Finally, my town gets AHEAD of the times, for once."
don't worry, Cinergy wasn't slashdotted, it was just a bad link actual Cinergy site
Theory of flight?! I'll teach you the theory of fist!!
did you RTFA? "He said the utility has found no problem with radio wave interference, a concern raised by many amateur radio operators." After a 1 year test, it didn't interfere, and the FCC really wants this to happen. It is going forward.
Amen. The interference this service causes on the amature bands is well documented at the ARRL website. I know there is the usual cry that Amature Radio is dead, and isn't useful, and what have you. But the fact is the amature radio service is a vital emergency service, and has a large population of experienced old-school hardware hackers who are still experimenting and adding to the art.
Broadband is good.
Broadband over powerlines - not so good.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
WKRP in cincinatttttiiiiiii! Old TV show. Had some guy named venus flytrap. And some lameass 80's nerd. Like, chester, lester, something like that. Oh, and there was a black guy, he was awesome.
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
Maybe you'd like to read more than the power company's own propoganda?
/. about how Austria dropped this idea due to interfearance issues. (sorry, I don't have the link)
::Baaaaaa!:: ::Baaaaaa!::
http://www.computerweekly.com/Article127428.htm
http://www.arrl.org/news/features/2003/07/08/
As well as the report recently on
Of course those that're looking to get your $29/mo are going to say it works!!
What??!! How can you say that?! Don't you know that it interferes with amateur radio? Don't you also realize that ham radio is The One True Geek Passtime? You're not allowed to support something that would cause interference to amateur radio operators. Report to Room 12 for re-education.
It's 60 Hertz in the US of A.
I've had DSL since 1998. I believe we had one of the earlier successful, widespread DSL rollouts. (Before that I will say that there WAS a big void in broadband - ISDN was never a real option here.)
Note that over the weekend Cincinnati Bell jumped residential broadband from 768kbs downstream to 3Mbit, without a rate increase! This is the second time they've significantly increased the bandwidth with no change in rates - the first time was just before the RoadRunner rollout. Long live competition!
There goes the mod points i just had.
For 3mb down/384 up Cox charges only 199/mo, business account. At least here in phoenix.
roadrunner is 3mb/384kbit for residental cable, and you can host whatever you want on it for 45 bucks a month. Sure, your ip is dynamic, but it only changes like once every 6 months - year. Even then, im sure you could get the static ip for a few bucks more each month...
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
I live in Cincy and have the phone company's dsl service (very good service I might add). Last couple weeks they've been upgrading everyone to 3mb/1mb and dropped the price a bit. Nice to see some competition stirring up the pot now. Good news on an otherwise sad day here in Cincinnati. Marge Schott passed away. :(
Les Nessman was the nerd.
Venus Flytrap was the black guy, and he was cool as hell.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Agree, but given the unlikelihood of that happening, here is a guy who makes a good skyline chili knockoff and it's dirt cheap (vs. $5 a can for real skyline sent mail order). It's spices only, you have to add meat and tomato sauce but its real easy to make.
It isn't just amateur radio. Try ships at sea, aeronautical communications, police, fire, forestry, government, military, disaster services, broadcasting, and many others. Those services are allocated those frequencies by international treaty. They are not going to vacate their frequencies so that a few pr0n addicts can download photoshopped pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar a little faster.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
It was a personal check, not a city check. Dumb, but not quite as dumb. This was before he was mayor, he was only a councilman, so I guess it didn't hurt him too bad.
And yeah, the "please" thing confused me for the first few weeks of college (at UC). The other things were, they say "sweep" rather than "vacuum", and they leave out "to be", for instance, "the carpet needs swept".
UNCORROBORATED? This is like asking for a study to see if people die when you shoot them! Wideband signals, when pushed through a long, unshielded wire, radiate. This is fact. Several very famous people in the 19th century figured this out.
Next stupid question? Perhaps you'd like an experiment to see if water freezes when you cool it?
You should read my post in the responses to the last time this was brought up. Regardless of what's using the spectrum that BPL interferes with, the fact that BPL does not in any way require or benefit from skywave propagation/ionospheric propagation and stomps all over the -only- frequency range that is pysically capable of bouncing off the atmosphere is a complete and utter waste. Not to mention that amateur radio provides long distance communications not only to third world countries, but more importantly in the event of a natural disaster. Ham radio operators are constantly pushing the limits of communications technology, what do you think the designers that work at the big communications companies do when they go home? Where do you think the communications buffs who join the big communications firms come from? Anyway, its a waste, and it tramples a service to the world that is without a doubt one of the most important ones when it comes to saving your life the next time you're stuck in a collapsed building like at the WTC towers.
Amateur radio has just as much right to exist as anything else in the spectrum.Actually, by law, Amateur Radio has more right to exist in the spectrum in question that broadband over power. Sorry. Not all portions of the EM spectrum are equally free in the US.
It won't affect cell phones and wireless networks. It will affect ham radio and other HF services. You will be able to receive the signals with a properly designed receiver. Whether or not you will be able to decrypt them will depend on how good a job the industry does on security.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
the Ronald Reagan Expressway...
two stadiums for teams that have traditionally rewarded their fans with either stinginess in acquiring/keeping talent (the Reds) or just plain incompetence (the Bengals), paid for with taxpayer money (local sales tax). The Reds actually told the city where they wanted their (free) stadium and the city complied. This is fiscal conservatism, I guess...
the police seemed to have been trained by the LAPD Rampart division (although they're apparently improving...)
These are some of the glories of Cincinnati... The chili and the pigs are good ideas, though. Cincinnati is a pretty city, but I am a clueless liberal and don't understand anything their government does.
no, Cinci was not involved. Thee blackout hit parts as far south as ~100 miles north of Cincinnati and it was a temporary (1-3 hrs) kinda thing.
I don't have much love for monopolies but Cinergy does seem to do a pretty good job of keeping the lights on.
A radio maverick jumps to internet only. The Future of Rock n Roll
In a major catastrophe, isn't it fairly likely that power lines will be down anyway (thereby eliminating HAM interference)?
This has already been discussed ad-infinitem, but apparently all the moderators haven't been listening, so here it goes again.
There are several major problems with that.
1) It may be likely that transmitter does not have power, but it is equally likely that he will need to contact people who do.
2) The major reason that ham radio is usefull in emergencies is because there is an active community of people that find ham radio a enjoyable recreation. Get rid of that and you will have less ham operators.
3) There are all sorts of emergencies where people still have power, but HAM is needed. Doesn't anyone remember 9/11? The powerlines were fine, but the phone, cell, and internet were all completly saturated.
If you knew anything about HF, you would know it propagates via the ionosphere thousands of miles away from it's source.
So even if the power was out say, in Denver, you would still be able to hear interference from a BPL system in NY, where the power may still be on.
Same argument for practicing "out in the country". If BPL became widespread, there would be interference everywhere regardless of whether the power was on or not.
Obviously you've missed the part about amatuer radio being a sanctioned FCC emergency service. It's there when others fail.
kc8apf
Zoomtown is not yet 3/1 MbPS, though they claim to be making the changes. RoadRunner has changed to 3, but it's not available in Northern Kentucky. Additionally, not everybody lives in town -- most rural communities out here don't have anything.
Unfortunately, some areas use Hamilton City power, so I doubt it's available to them.
I bet this will be big in Northern Kentucky.
WKRP was actually in Dallas Georgia ...
Cincinnati had a large Germanic population in the early years. This use of 'please' comes from the German word 'bitte' which can mean please in the usual sense but also the 'come again?' sense.
I did the search and read about a dozen articles (mainly from William Hepburn...he seems the most knowledgeable apparently) and it still seems this phenomenon is dependent on weather; not the wave lengths themselves or any other outside force. The reason people can receive AM transmissions further from their source is the fact that they have a longer wave length versus FM...hence some of these waves can travel over a curvature longer....like the earth's surface. That's why you'll lose a FM station faster from the point of origin than an AM station. In bad weather, you'll lose both at the same rate....which also lends credence to William Hepburn's theory; weather. This may, or may not affect transmissions from SA to NA, however in either case communications in ALL forms are usually affected by the weather so we're back to square one; regardless of how they propogate.
[SIG] Remember Mattel handheld games?
While I agree that the ARRL has a vested interest in this debate, I think it is fair to say that they know a thing or two about interference (see this link for instance). Not only has this been shown to interfere, think of the interference to BPL. Allowing this to go forward will force something to give.
This isn't just a local problem either. Have a look at this report from the ECC (they are a European agency) [NOTE: Sorry, it is in MS Word format]. They clearly believe that interference potential in the frequency range up to 30 MHz "are such that the risk of interference to radio services cannot be limited to a national or regional scale" (see the section entitled "General Conclusions of the report). This is a 112 page report, and while I freely admit I have not read all of it, they clearly say that this won't be a local problem, so just leaving the city isn't going to help. They go on to say that complete interference level restrictions won't work since so many devices currently give off interference in these ranges, but that the BPL (Called PLT in this report) will give "much higher" level of interference.
Several people in this tread have argued that amateur radio is a "dinosaur" or lived passed its usefulness. Many have already pointed out the problems with this. In many parts of the country, HF radio is the only reliable form of communication. In emergency situations HAM radio has proved itself many times over. Have a look here for instance. FEMA have defended the need for amateur radio on numerous occasions.
There is more at stake here than HAM. Have a look at this chart. Of particular interest are the chunks that are noted as "Radio Astronomy". Have a look at this report. Of note here is that the radio astronomy bands have issues with interference already. Solar and molecular cloud observations fall in these wavelengths. Do we really want to add to the pollution of the electromagnetic spectrum? The BPL system will also be subject to interference. This seems like a lose-lose situation to me.
> once wireless and other alternative technologies abound
Satellite wireless broadband is fairly available. I can get it here, where
DSL is not available. However, it's only good for downstream, which rather
limits its usefulness as far as I'm concerned. I could download ISOs instead
of buying CDs from cheapbytes.com, but I could not, for example, do X11
forwarding to my work system from home or to my home system from work. So
it's not worth the outrageous price they want to charge for it. Also, there
are compatibility issues depending on what OS you use.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I live in Cincinnati and it's causing terrible interference in the HF bands, we can't hear -ANYTHING- now...
I talked to our local HAM club and they said that there's nothing we can do about it legally... seems like this is already a lost battle
10Mb/sec down and up + static IP for $15/month
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.