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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.
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
I want to see the first guy to to try tap into that broadband illegally....bzzzp!
I can't wait! I'm going to go tear a lamp cord off the lamp, fray the wires, and jam them into my modem port. Pretty soon I'll be surfing the way Al Gore meant us to!
signed, Les Nessman.
I wonder if they will deliver on the promise of 1 mb/s upstream. Getting a megabit down is common place these days, but that kind of upload bandwidth would be nice to have for 30 bucks a month...
-dewhite
Ham Radio will interfere with it severely, and there won't be a damn thing the provider can do because it's under FCC part 15, which must accept any harmful interference, especially from PROPERLY LICENSED services. Of course, the same rules will also hold the power company for any interference caused to the amateur radio service. Don't expect this to be available for long. Maybe now everybody will see that it doesn't work and let the abomination die like it should.
Why is it that the (currently) most controversial method of broadband internet access gets symmetric speeds by default? Are power companies the only ones to realize that it makes sense to give identical upload and download?
print 'Hello world!';
http://compbrain.net
so what are the interference ramifications of this?? i still hear people complain about this. i think the biggest thing to note is the price. im under the impression that cable/dsl are typically 40-50 around the US. if this is an indication, then i think power internet will become prevelent quickly. cheaper and more widely available (theoretically)
I know that broadband over power lines sounds nice, but what if you lose power? How ya gonna surf the....oh...um...nevermind.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I live in a pretty big apartment, and my landlord takes care of all of the electricity. Will I still be able to get broadband over power lines? I assume they should be able to work it like a cable modem (i.e. everyone in the building is on the same cable line), but don't know technical details about broadband over power lines.
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!!
Yep. And since I'm a duly licensed amateur radio operator, then if it's rolled out in my area then they have to put up with the interference.
I still think that interference with government services on the HF bands will be the death, if not at least the curtailment, this technology. At the very least it cant be deployed near any government installation.
Expect somewhat intense resistance to BPL from telecoms and cable companies. They are not just competing for broadband customer in the DSL/Cable/BPL high speed Internet market.
Once you have a megabit-per-second+ line, you can start talking about all sorts of things, including VoIP and video on delivery piggy-backing on national grid.
Am I missing something?
Indeed, a fairly high bandwidth pipe utilizing existing infrastructure. What's not "special"? The only line going into someones house that's more pervasive than the phone line are power lines. And no mention of dsl's distance woes. Big news indeed. If it comes here, I'm all over this.
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.
Throw away your surge protectors for more bandwidth! Install lightening rods to increase your chances of power surges! ;)
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
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...
This is pretty bad. I was using my electric toothbrush after I had my house wired for electric internet. I noticed this bad taste, and all of a sudden, I'd somehow downloaded some porn spam into my mouth. Yeecchhhhhh.
I live just north of Cinci and the local DSL provider (Zoomtown) just bumped their customers up to 3/1 MbPS (something like $40 a month). Roadrunner cable (~$45 a month I believe) is also a big competitor in the area. Cool technology, but are they really going to get a big market share with cheap slow dial-up at $10 less a month and bigger band at $10-15 more? Seems to me they need to increase their speed to compete with broadband or lower their price to compete with dialup.
1: Could someone with a properly configured radio reciever monitor traffic over this system wirelessly?
2: If it's possible to monitor signals with radio equipment, could you transit? Is it unreasonable to call this analagous to the power co. deciding they're going to switch all their equipment over a wireless network?
Now all they need to do is invent a UPS box that can store 30 minutes of surfing for backup when the power goes out....
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
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!
It interferes with more than amateur radio operators... meh
Think of a giant unshielded antenna that spans hundreds or thousands of miles. yee-haw
Dumb-ass power companies trying to make a buck.
Yes, but over here in our little corner of the universe we like to call "Rational Land," scientific "studies" conducted by for-profit organizations, especially when such studies appear to benefit said organizations, are considered highly suspect until corroborated by external researchers.
But thanks for playing.
Oh well, I guess I will be selling excess bandwidth back to the power company along with any extra power.
When do these winter clouds move out?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Hellz yea! Man what I wouldn't give to get out form under the iron boot of my damn ISP. Yea, I get 3 mbs down, but only like .2 up, and I NEEEEEED that upload bandwidth!!!
I think it'll be good just for the extra competition to drive down the prices.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
PG&E has enough trouble delivering electricity over the power lines, let alone internet access.
Speaking of which, wasn't Cincinnati one of the cities that got hit by the east coast blackout?
Rank Presidents by th
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.
Cable lines are shielded (COAX); power lines aren't (and can't be, really, at those power levels).
DNA just wants to be free...
The majority often times rules. Or at least lately those with the most money make the rules/laws.
I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of computer/internet users would side with $30/month symmetrical 1Mbps.
Nothing personal and I'm not trying to offend anyone.
Who will guard the guards?
If there is truly a conflict, I hope the hams can be given some other chunk of spectrum to operate with, because the number of people interested in accessing the Internet truly dwarfs the number interested in ham radio. I do have some sympathy for "we were here first" but at some point it would simply be a tyranny of the minority.
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
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
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.
YOU are the minority. There are people on this planet OUTSIDE the USA, do you know that? There are BILLIONS of people who are not interested in your cheap broadBAND access, but they certainly are interested in broadCAST access.
/.
BPL is RF pollution of the worst kind. It does NOT stop at your borders, quite on the contrary. It makes it impossible for millions of people all over the world to listen to a shortwave transistor radio, to get information, to be entertained and to connect with others.
BPL uses the entire shortwave spectrum and creates a noise floor that can be heard all over the world (Ever heard of shortwave propagation? Ever heard what BPL sound like? I guess not.). With your snotty narrowminded attitude you are in fact denying people their right to free access of information.
Cincinatti goes broadband with hundreds of watts of RF energy dissipated into the atmosphere and South America won't be able to listen to their AM radio stations anymore.
BTW, this is not about ham radio, even though I have had my ham radio license since 1979. No, this is about the millions of villages all over the planet, tuning into shortwave radio broadcasts as their only source of timely information. Hundreds of Millons of individuals will love Americans for denying them that.
Tyrrany of the minority, indeed. Since Americans barely represent 5% of this planet's population that statement fits the shoe perfectly, though I suspect it was made with a slightly different angle in mind in your case.
BTW, "I hope the hams can be given some other chunk of spectrum to operate with" is about as perfect a display of ignorance as I have seen, even here on
Obviously you know absolutely nothing of how large scale emergencies are handled, with respect to communication.
ARES, Amature Radio Emergency Services, steps up with the communications infrastructure is gone, due a disaster, natural or man-made.
Basically, a bunch of well-trained hams setup radio stations and manage the creation of an ad-hoc radio communications infrastructure when the main one goes down.
The World Trade Center had communcations by end of day, or end of the next day due to ARES going into motion and getting base-stations setup, probably all running on generators, so that those on-site trying to find survivors could communicate with each other and the outside world.
Now, with BPL, while you're trying to get this setup (becase the land-lines are gone, and the cell system is a laughingstock that's overran by people trying to call home), you've got the powerlines all radiating a ton of crap out in the airwaves. This is probably people trying to use their internet connection, even though the power's out, and they've got their generator running (those of us in certain more rural areas pretty much are required to own one to stay funcitonal).
All that background noise just makes it that much harder to communciate.
I suspect the fellow you are responding too is truly ignorant to the scope of the situation.
I thought the exact same thing as you. The issue is not interference with HAM operators -- that's just a side effect of the bigger issue.
The problem is that most people don't understand what RF even is. We need a good analogy that regular people can understand so they can appreciate the scope of the problem.
For instance, there are rules that state how bright and wide the beams can be on our vehicles headlamps. These guys are metaphorically attaching aerial flood lamps to a school bus so everyone in their vehicle can see for miles. The side effect is everyone else on the road is now blind. In this case the light is the transmitter and your eyes are the receiver.
How bout this one, your in a gym having a conversation with some friends -- then a marching band comes rolling in screamming the schools fight song. Guess who the band represents. Try carrying on your conversation now.
The FCC part 15 rules exist for a reason. We just need to make sure they are enforced.
I say let these guys launch the service then we can document the scope of the problems this technology creates before we crush them.
I like the idea of BPL. The power companys just need to run RF grade sheilded power lines first.
Oh, oops thats right. It would cost money -- alot more than just bribing the right senators.
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.