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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."
Cincinatti is famous for something other than WKRP.
Uh, putting chili on spaghetti?
Having a city park graced by golden statues of winged pigs?
Having each of the following: a first rate art museum, a first rate botanical garden, and a first rate zoo?
I've only been there a few times, but seemed like a pretty cool place to me, even from my jaded coastal geek perspective.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
How about symmetrical data rates?
How about less than either cable or DSL pricing?
How about available anywhere you have power (which computers usually need to operate)?
As soon as it's available in my AO, I'll be jumping ship from my current provider.
How about RTFA?
Who will guard the guards?
You may get 3Mbps downstream (as do I with my cable setup), but note that cable providers limit the upstream - usually to 384kbps or less. So in that aspect at least, the broadband-over-powerlines is more than double the cable offering.
A better comparison, I would think, would be that this is 2/3rds of a T1, at a FRACTION of the cost!
I'm also wondering if b-over-p suffers from the same amount of network congestion problems as cable (and even DSL) are prone too....
Worrying works!! 99% of all the stuff I worry about never happens
If they can deliver and the service becomes commonplace, you'd definitely see an increase of quality game servers. I have a pretty nice secondary computer that I'd like to host games on, but not at the price of a T1. So yeah, 1 mb/s up would be nice for 30 bucks a month.
WKRP on the Web
Nice? Nice??
My god, it would be sublime! Comcast, AT&T, Charter, Cox (and any other big cable companies) charge $$$$ for upload speeds over 128kbps. And that's assuming that your in an area where they can offer those higher speeds to a residence, or bother to offer "commercial" service.
Comcast wants over $200 a month for a commercial service that offers 256kbps up. Cox, who I will be using after I move in 2 weeks, offers 3mb down / 256kbps up for $79. That's their commercial service. But..wait for it...for 3mb down / 384 up they want $325.00. I can't speak for AT&T or Charter specifically, as I have not recently lived in areas where either service is available.
If this type of broadband proves reliable, affordable to deploy, and sells for under $50.00 a month, cable companies are going to be in very big trouble...assuming they ignore the obvious.
Let me tell you about how Part 15 certification *really* works. They found no problems because they didn't go looking for them. The only BPL trials so far have been: 1) very limited in area, 2) very limited in time, (1 year? Continuous? Hardee-har) 3) some of them on underground primaries, 4) they don't poll HF spectrum users to find out about interference.
The BPL trials have winked on and off so fast that no interference complaints could be logged. It takes a *lot* of time to document an interference complaint so that it is sufficient for an FCC filing.
The Part 15 industry is notorious for submitting "lab queens" to the FCC for certification. Especially the Part 15 devices that run on house wiring and over power lines... they only *model* the power lines, and the models are pathetically simple-minded -- the better to pass Part 15.
Part 15 is a cesspool of spectrum mismanagement and BPL is the biggest turd ever. What galls me is that the FCC should be playing honest broker here, but instead they are cheerleading a questionable technology.
Because cable line was designed for wide-band signals: it's coaxial!
A power line, OTOH, is just a very long piece of wire.
the utility has found no problem with radio wave interference and microsoft has found no fundamental security weaknesses in its products. and enron saw no problem with inventing intangible investments. bush found no reason to think saddam wouldn't make a mushroom cloud out of us any day. and i have a marvelous over-water vehicular conveyance device located in brooklyn i can let you have for a pittance. and i see no problem giving you a quit-claim deed to it.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
I think this throws another player into the fray. One of the main things i hope happens it it becomes a 3 horse race between cable/dsl/power. Cable companies will be forced to improve performance and reduce prices DSL will be forced to expand network coverage allowing for rural America and other huge city's to have coverage. This will also make them fix their price structure. And power, because it already has the infrastructure up will force them to add more infrastructure to compete. This can only be good as far as a economic standpoint. Broadband is still an oligopoly but [hopefully] once wireless and other alternative technologies abound we will have a truly competitive market.
As to your first point, yes ham radio would work once the power was out (and BPL was off as it would be), but if you force people to go out to the middle of nowhere to practice, THEY WON'T. Besides which, one of the great points of BPL is that it runs over powerlines so it can be run sold to houses out in the middle of no where, because they're on the power grid. So you couldn't go out into the country unless you decide to trek a few miles into the middle of farmers fields where you won't be near a power line.
Yes, something will replace ham radio if it dies, but that doesn't make it OK to kill ham radio. If humans die, a new dominate speciese will probably appear after a few million years, does that mean we should kill all humans? After all, only a few species want/depend on humans. For many others, humans are "in the way" of their "progress". Same logic, just a rediculous example.
Also, how are riding 3-wheeled ATVs and riding 4-wheeled ATVs mutually exclusive? Nationwide deployment of BPL threatens to kill ham radio, but your friends can still ride a 3-wheeled ATV.
Ham radio does more than just FEMA stuff. Hams help with parades, marathons, races, triathalons, storm chasing, teaching electronic and radio theory to new people, providing a new and interesting way to communicate, all sorts of research, etc. Ham radio fosters good will with other countries. You can talk to other countries, meet interesting people, etc. In some remote areas (like in some island chains) ham radio can be a major source of interisland communication.
How would you like it if ATVs were banned from being used and sold because of their environmental impact? Why make the environment suffer for your little hobby. You could still ride bikes, you could switch to that. Quit holding back environmental progress by clining to some pointless hobby that doesn't even serve the community (like ham radio does)?
Don't drag down my hobby just because you don't care, please.
PS: All of this is ignoring that fact that my ham radio frequencies are protected BY LAW and that the power companys CAN NOT interfer with them. We're not just some group saying "don't kill our hobby", our hobby is legally protected.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Hams object, not because it's a good and valid method of delivering bits, but because it interferes with emergency communications.
8
There's lots of ways to get good Internet feeds to folks; just look at what Robert X. Cringely has done with 802.11b. Look in the archives of his columns at www.pbs.org and see there are untapped alternatives.
To understand why we're concerned, go switch your hi-fi to AM, tune to a vacant spot between stations, and turn up the volume about half way. Then, try to have a phone conversation over a bad cellular connection with your ear six inches from the speakers, and you will still have an easier time communicating than hams will when we experience the 16 db over S9 interference already demonstrated by BPL.
I will make a small wager with you, shaka999. If you live within North America, I'll wager your state's or province's emergency plan counts on hams. So does your county's emergency plan, and your city's.
You see, hams _practice_ at getting data through emergency conditions. We do it at our expense, with equipment we buy, build and maintain ourselves, without government funds.
There's even a subsection of every national ham organization dedicated to emergency services. Yeah, I belong to one, and was out in the last ice storm, two months ago, delivering nurses to the local hospital because the roads were otherwise impassible, and the locals had already overloaded the cellular network to the point where a fast busy tone or "All Circuits Busy" signal was as likely as dial tone.
BPL threatens the entire ability to function on the frequencies needed the most for long-range communications, the HF bands. If this interfered with TV (VHF and UHF), well, everyone would kvetch, but instead the power companies have designed these systems to use HF (aka shortwave) frequencies.
Long range radio relies on HF, because it takes those lower frequencies to effectively bounce off the inner layer(s) of the ionosphere. Higher frequencies (VHF, UHF, SHF, microwave) just zip right through the F, F1 & F2 layers, so we can't do bank shots to get a signal from Earthquakestan to Resourceland to let them know how many units of Type A to send.
Satellite? Well, gee, that presumes the ground stations survived that quake/tornado/hurricane/typhoon, that the power didn't fail, and the phone lines to the earth station still work. Oh, yeah, and IF there's a free satellite channel for us, which NASA's problems have not made any easier.
Now, America's three-quarters of a million hams are not alone here, as you make it seem. The NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration), who you'd expect to be gung-ho over more bandwidth to previously underserved areas, and also FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), have gone on record to object. They document that BPL was a complete disaster, interference-wise, when tried in Japan. The Austrian trials are on hold because the power companies there were not able to rein in the interference.
But, it's Politics with a Capital P; who is beholden to whom, and who bought whom.
Now, you might say, 'well, if there's a disater, the power's down, right'? Not necessarily. BPL can cause interference for miles and miles, but if a hospital needs to call for blood, what's the power company supposed to do, shut down the entire grid?
Besides, remember that hams buy their own gear to practice and learn with. If we can't use HF, well, no one will buy new HF gear, no one will learn the tricks of HF (which is _very_ different than the skills needed for the garden-variety, talk-around-town two meter and 70 cm band users), and no one will bother to keep the automated packet netowrks in service, the digital backbones of the ham world which move the vast majority of message traffic.
Sometimes, _nothing_ but Morse ("the original digital") will get through, but with BPL jamming the HF spectrum, morse will become a dead letter.
I mean, man, you can put a bra on Michael Powell, and yuk it up all you want (see URL) but, damnit, these changes will *kill* people.
http://www.wweek.com/story.php?story=485
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA