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Broadband Over Power Lines vs. Radio Relayers
amaiman writes "Recently, broadband Internet access has been increasing around the country. These broadband signals, while providing Internet access to remote communities that would normally not be able to receive broadband, are causing enormous interference to the radio spectrum. This article details some of the problems, and a video available on the American Radio Relay League's (ARRL) site shows exactly how much interference the broadband power lines can cause. Detailed information is also available on the ARRL site."
But I thought that hams where saying that BPL would destroy radio communication for 100's of miles around? This video only shows the effect when they are very near the powerlines.
They also play word games by saying it is on the agenda at the FCC. On the agenda doesn't mean that they will approve it, it simply means they are looking at it.
Lastly, it doesn't help hams when hams say they will just pump out a 1kw signal to drownout the BPL signal, that action will simply result in the group with the most votes winning, and that isn't the hams.
Broadcast radio over the internet.
YAY!
who carez?
i want high-speed warez
fo' shizzle ma dizzle kizzle till the tizzle bizzle is frizzléd.
... of why the FCC is so damned ineffective. I thought the FCC was commissioned to prevent just this sort of thing? Apparently these days it is only another government hypocricy that panders to the highest-paying lobby.
bash: rtfm: command not found
yikes almighty?
art& bill's acceleNT ADventure?
we guard our american borders.....???
woo-woo? or, lookout bullow? you tell 'em robbIE? then you won't have to spend so much time abusing your fauxking PostBlock censorship cevise?
Art Bell (coasttocoastam.com) has a big beef against BOP (Broadband Over Power) for obvious reasons.
Life is not for the lazy.
yet another self-correction by the pateNTdead eyecon0meter kode.
this stuff is unbreakable, & wwworks on several (more than 3) dimensions.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators... generating newclear power since forever.
This article is 4 months old. In March the power company Cinergy in Cincinnati started offering broadband over powerlines. I havn't heard much about that since then, I really would like to hear something about that. Is it still around? Is anyone using it? Are there any complaints?
01100010 01101001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100101
First wardialing, then wardriving, now... warduracelling.
Here in Cedar Rapids IA, we already have it, i can go and see the units themselves mounted on the powerlines, and pick them up with kismet and netstumbler along glass road. Im a ham too, so i dont really care for this, they can find a better way to get broadband to everyone.
Yo, editors! Wake up!
The latest RFC don't deal with broadband over power lines any more. It's been tried, and power companies have folded over this bet.
My own power company gave up and found it more efficient to simply lay TCP/IP fiber along the new power lines instead.
No, the new thing is not TCP/IP over electricity lines, but electricity over TCP/IP lines, as detailed in RFC3251.
Probably should be "... these broadband signals, while providing Internet access to remote communities that would normally not be able to receive broadband, are causing enormous interference to the radio spectrum."
___
internet, productivity blog
On a previous project we used point to point optical /.ers?
units, I remember the output was only a few hundred milliwatts but we were p2ping 5Km or more in fair
visibility. Surely optical wavelenghs are not restricted and civillian versions of this sort of
optical tranciever are available? Someone has to line them up at installation, but its as easy as doing a microwave dish. I think a network of point to point laser trancievers would be ideal for remote raural coms in the out back and beyond. With this kind of power efficiency repeaters would easily run from solar cells. What think the
actually, it's not a recent thing, broadband has been increasing for almost a decade now. perhaps the poster meant "broadband internet over powerlines", although it would be an incredible oversight to have left that out in the first sentence of the article.
"while providing..., and causing
good job "editors". i fear i will never be able to justify getting a slashdot account as long as this sloppiness continues.
Articles about BPL that get technical often bring up comparisons between how it works in the US vs. Europe. For various historical/technical evolution reasons, including population densities, the two sides of the pond have much different concentrations of number of users per power transformer, and supposedly the technology makes a lot more economic sense in Europe. In the US, one of the more interesting markets is rural access, where distances are too long for DSL and cable TV isn't very common - satellite's an obvious alternative, but satellite latency is annoying. Non-Amish farmers have tended to be fairly wired for a long time - the commodities and futures markets have a major impact on how you can get the best price for your crops, and even old modems and Apple IIs were good enough to get trading information and text-based weather reports, but more bandwidth is always better.
But the other obvious market is that it's another wired or near-wired access method to get bits to your house, besides the Phone Companies and cable modems, which means it increases competition for the phone business as well as data business. Power companies already have a certain amount of potential simply from owning right-of-way, though sometimes the phone companies own the poles, and state Public Utility Commission regulators often create all kinds of strange rulings about who can do what with the shared assets (a problem cable tv companies have had, especially when they want to sell bandwidth on the fibers they run in shared right-of-way.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
We had to make HF frequencies by hand! In the Snow! Uphill both ways!
Shortwave radio communication over any long distance (commercial, military and hobbyist) often deals with weak signals. Each broadband power line adds to the background noise cumulatively raising the problem. One power line won't trash your TV signal (unless you are very close), but each one adds noise until all you have is snow.
Its like people talking in the background - a couple of people don't do much harm but when you try and talk across a room full of quietly talking people two things happen
1. The cumulative background noise reduces the signal
2. You turn the volume up (as the amateur radio people will have to and although entitled too don't wish too because it causes other users problems)
When you turnt he volume up, they all have to talk louder, so you get a fight between high and higher BPL power (to avoid radio wiping out internet, and higher and higher radio power for the same reason). At which point nobody can communicate usefully and lots of third parties are harmed.
HF interference isn't just an amateur radio problem either - you might well find you get 802.11 dead zones if you are near a power line using it. You may not be able to use radio controlled toys in an area with too many power lines and so on. Finally HF is essential to things like flying medical services and some rural communcation systems.
It all gets quite messy when this happens because good radio practice is the lowest possible power. The lower the power you can use the more people can use the same frequency. If everyone has to use 1KW then you'll get a lot less frequencies.
I'd also say their description of the FCC is in tune with its historical decision making - just look at the monopolisation of US commercial radio and the continued unneccessary exclusion of most small transmitters which could exist and other countries have proved are not a problem. Of course BPL background noise might well wipe out the scope for very low power radio stations too.
BTW: BPL trials in the UK (way before the US) were shelved for several reasons but intereference was a big one.
It shouldn't be insoluble - one nice property of radio is that if you can get the BPL encoding frequencies high enough then the interference problems become much less of an issue.
(PS: I defy you to find a radio astronomer who won't use expletives when asked abtut BPL..)
BPL has been tried in Germany by almost all major power companies, but they have basically given up on it. Reason: It does not work, plain and simple.
There are a few companies around that sell so called PLC-to-Ethernet adaptors you can plug into your power outlet to bridge floors or so, but they're not working either.
Testing has shown that the signal attenuation between two of these PLC adaptors is actually higher than the free space attenuation - so these adaptors would work just as good or even better if they were not connected to a power line at all :-)
I think BPL is basically a dead horse, and slashdot should stop beating it.
Thanks, Slashdot, for this article. One the cat is out of the bag, he won't go back in...so it's important that BPL gets ripped out when it fails (which it will...oh yes we have WAYS of making it fail. For instance, all BPL ISPs will be filtered at my firewall. And I am a licensed amateur, and will file an endless stream of takedown complaints to the FCC, as hams ARE the primary users of the bands in question). So, doing whatever it takes to delay any implementation, on a local level, is appropriate. It would be a good idea for municipalities to ban it.
shield the cable (and obviously earth the shield)
that way nothing gets in, nothing gets out - everybody wins (exceept those who pay for the cable)
There is only a fairly small frequency band in existence that can be used for inexpensive worldwide communication, and that is HF. The reason are more or less predictable Ionosphere layers that reflect radiowaves.
Under good conditions, you can transmit halfway across the world, with just 1-5 Watts of transmission power. The Amateur Radio community knows this as "QRP" operation, and it is quite popular. So, yes, even small amounts of HF noise will go a long way to interfere with shortwave communication.
20 years ago a sizable amount of communication was still being done by shortwave (HF) radio, and anybody thinking about poisioning large chunks of HF spectrum would've been declared a raving lunatic. Every kHz of HF spectrum was (and still is) a prized posession. Look up any frequency book from the 80's and you'll see that there wasn't a Hertz of HF spectrum unallocated, and it was (and still is) tightly controlled by international agreements. For large Radio stations (BBC, VOA), it is still the only way to connect to people in dictatorships and less advanced countries.
Today, most commercial and military communication in the US has moved to satellite; Only smaller services (in the west), third world countries, radio stations and HAM radio operators use HF. Of course, why would large power companies care about other countries or the BBC news ?
The HF spectrum is still the most valuable piece of electromagentic real estate there is in the World. Purposefully injecting additional noise into the band for no other reason than to save a few bucks is a terrible mistake and shows ignorance and recklessness on a staggering level.
all three of you.
No, same old crap. The only difference here is that Timothy read "American Radio Relay League", didn't know that that means "ham radio", and thought it was someone new complaining.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
A very important yet often overlooked thing to keep in mind while thinking about "broadband over power lines," as I have already written countless times with little effect, is the very fact that it all has started as a scam. The idea has been introduced by Luke Stewart, a scam artist who has promised more than billion gigabits per second (sic) with his "Media Fusion" snake oil.
This scam and those billions gigabits per second was the only reason why "broadband over power lines" has been ever considered in the first place. See these links for sources and much more informative details and background.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
I have found a direct link to the article I was quoting in my previous post, The Electric Kool-Aid Bandwidth Test by Evan Ratliff. It is long but very interesting and enlightening. True eye opener. Enjoy.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Lots of people live very near power lines. So it will affect lots of people.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
"These broadband signals, while providing Internet access to remote communities that would normally not be able to receive broadband, and causing enormous interference to the radio spectrum."
Nice work.
Why are amature radio bands so special? I hope I don't piss any hams off, but what's the point in trying to fling your voice clear across the world when you could use the 'Net? Why can't we have another competitor to cable/DSL?
Please, someone help me out on this one. I really want to know the modern reasoning and necessity of the amature radio band.
*A
Provideing a highspeed network to a rural area is a hard problem. There are few customers to offset the operating expenses.
A local start-up was working on a highspeed network for rural areas. It used HF in a licenced band so interferance would not have been an issue. Because the system used HF one tower could cover quite a large area. The speeds were not lightning fast but were faster then modems. I believe the project goal was just a little faster then sattelite.
Unfortunately the project was killed for two reasons. The first was patents. There are some (arguably obvious) patents that cover highspeed networks over HF. The patents owners were not interested in developing the technology themselves, rather they wanted to charge exhorbitant fees to licence the patents. Given enough money this issue could have been resolved, but when coupled with the second problem project was canceled. The second problem was lack of a market.
From the start the system was designed to serve sparsely populated rural areas. This system could not compete with DSL, cable or 802.11 based systems. The bandwidth was slower, and more the system was more expensive. The setup costs were high as a client station needed a good HF transciever and antenna. The service fees were high as the base stations were designed to only handle a few customers. The system had to be heavily optimized for rural areas in order to achieve the large distances required. The optimizations were such that it could not even be scaled back to compete in the quasi-rural suburban environments. The system was expensive. While an end customer might be willing to pay $1000 to setup a station, plus $100/month for highspeed no provider was willing to take the risk when a base tower could easily cost $100k just to install.
I suspect that highspeed of power lines is going to face similar challenges and suffer the same fate. The setup costs are deffinately lower, but the system is still faced with some of the same technical problems. Long distances cause more noise, which lowers bandwidth, which reduce the number of customers on a given segment. With fewer customers there is less chance of a profit.
...for now, and I live out in the stix and don't have broadband,and I have certainly whined about it enough, but I STILL don't want anything that will mess up the radios. No SUH. I look at my radios as my ultimate backup communications tool. The telcos can go down, the internet can go down, the TV stations off air, cells can be jammed up-and I still have communication, and it's both ways commo if I want it. And you can get information in real time, from a variety of places all over the planet, with any normal multiband receiver and a chunk of scrap wire for an antenna, Under 50$ and you're in. And it costs zero but some minimal electric power, you don't even need grid power, run it off your car battery in an emergency. Free as in beer and free as in speech, short range down the block to around the world range- what's not to like? Let them study it some more in places that are using it, I read about in scotland I think they tried it, but don't just dump it out there and "see what happens". I'll wait for my broadband with low powered wifi and a directional antenna or if someone decides to run some better cablez down the road. We don't need to trade one form of electronic human communication for another, we can have BOTH if we are smart.
How come AEP (an investor in Amperion) is not rolling out BPL in their service area? You would think that they would be all over something they invested in. However, they seem to be backing away from them.
If you must invest, invest in wireless.
The ARRL just celebrated it's 90th anniversary. Ham radio was around before that.
A bit ironic that you need a broadband connection to see the video from ARRL - isn't it. I think the ARRL and older hams are just angry about the Internet drawing people from amateur radio and are not getting the picture of how the Internet can be used to encourage more people into the hobby. ie. Repeater relays via the net, IP packet over radio, etc. Hey give up your morse code paddles and step into 2004. (It's also time to ditch the code requirement). Nathan Smith, KC8MTQ nathanmsmith.com
For more information on the problems with BPL than you'd ever want, read the NTIA Notice of Proposed Rulemaking Comments and the Phase One Study.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
It seems to me that most radio receivers, e.g. analog FM receivers, are not robust. They can be affected by signals on nearby frequencies. It seems to me that they rely on very low usage of the RF spectrum. Perhaps it is time for a transition to more advanced and robust receiver technology.
HF is still used a lot more than that. There are significant parts of the globe that are unreachable by geosynchronous satellites.
Pretty well written, until I got to "Purposefully injecting additional noise into the band for no other reason than to save a few bucks is a terrible mistake and shows ignorance and recklessness on a staggering level." Next time try to finish cleanly, without exaggeration.
This is a legitimate question even if it could have asked better.
that broadband over powerlines actually causes heavy electricity. Ask Steven Berkoff.
Hopefully this BPL stuff will never see the light of day. I have emailed several of the companies that run testing sites in a few cities around the U.S. and have not recieved ONE response. Its nice to know that they care about the service they provide. As an amateur radio operator, if this service ever comes to my area, you can bet I would be on the phone every day if I had to, just to make sure that I never have a problem. Most of the people experice signals over S9 in all the HF bands in these testing areas. Really sad and really stupid. This is 2004, we should be able to come up with something better. Joe W1SK
This is a great article. (But Score:0? Moderators are obviously on crack again.) Please let me quote few relevant fragments. Media Fusion founders named in suit by Jeff Bounds from the March 19 2004 print edition of the Dallas Business Journal:
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Are you sure? What about Herbalife? What about homeopathy? What about Microsoft? What about Scientology? What about Bush? Are you sure that scams don't last and don't grow? Or maybe just because I am paranoid there are no conspiracies in the world whatsoever? I wouldn't be so sure there is really "nothing to fear." Hell, I wouldn't probably even have posted those links if I wasn't sure my arse is covered! I think it is very important to talk about the Broadband Over Power Lines scam, exactly because it is a scam.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
The problem is that in Germany, you have people who will listen to reason. Over here you have wild sheeples who only listen to marketing hype.
;-)
This is of course why your government is starting to switch to SuSE and everyone over here who isn't a technical person still loves Microsoft products.
Seriously though -- the hype surrounding how "wondeful" BPL will be is being paid for by someone... someone with a LOT of cash... on this side of the pond.
Your deployment trials sound a lot more sane than our headlong rush into badly engineered technology.
+++OK ATH
Amen. Mods the parent up up up.
+++OK ATH
There are plenty of other ways to get broadband Internet to rural areas. This really makes one wonder if there's any connection with Enron trying to get into the "backbone bandwidth brokering" business at the same time they were buggering Grandma in California. Co-opting the local power companies into shilling for them an reselling their "service" along with kilowatt-hours whould go right along with the rest of their sleazy modus operandi.
There's still a fair amount of military and civil HF traffic.
A quick scan of the HF bands reveals quite a lot of RTTY and FAX still, as well as VOLMET and the HF civil aviation frequencies (which are still quite active, choose the right frequency and its almost continuously active over the Atlantic). I heard an RAF SSB frequency the other day, it was still active (although the traffic was mostly asking for updates on the football).
Then there's the US Government with its 'Radio Free $(region)' which is still active as well as all those US religious/evangelical stations.
The HF bands are still very active, and may even become moreso again if DRM (Digital Radio Mondial) takes off.
And the powerlines will probably not cause just HF interference. They could also cause interference on other bands, and may even affect medical equipment in hospitals as well as interference to emergency services.
It is a monumentally stupid idea...
(and if you want more broadband, well, BT is looking into running fibre optic cable to every house in the UK...)
No one will read this but I can't help but to say it anyway...
Worrying about how ham radio operators fit in to a plan to serve broadband to millions of people is like worrying about how horse and buggy drivers fit into a plan to build an interstate hiway.
I used to live near Cincinnati and work on Shortwave Amateur Radio bands a few years back. During a recent visit to that area I noticed extremely strong RFI (radio frequency intereference) on AM and othe bands while driving through - probably the result of the introdiction of BPL service in that area ? From my experience - it will be impossible to use these frequencies for normal communication use.
I am amazed that a services like BPL which caues widespread RFI like this is allowd to operate.
Also since so much of this is being radialted all over the place it will be only a matter of time beofore somone taps into these signals and opens an easily accessible backdor to this type of internet connection (park your vehicle near a powerline - hack in !)
Yes. The number of Slashdotters who are opposed to the idea seems to have gone up (based on a totally informal evaluation by myself). I'd say that's very significant, and very encouraging.
>most commercial and military communication in the
>US has moved to satellite; Only smaller services
>(in the west), third world countries, radio
>stations and HAM radio operators use HF
Actually, the U.S. military still makes *heavy* use of the HF portion of the radio spectrum - primary modes are SSB (long-distance voice communications) and ALE (a digital system for sending short messages and for analyzing the reliability of particular frequency). Emergency services, such as FEMA and the Red Cross, also make heavy use of 'shortwave' for their long-distance/emergency communications. FEMA even responded to the FCC's request for comments to argue against deploying BPL, apparently to no effect (which surprised me - i thought they'd pull more weight, seeing as the've been incorporated into the Department for Homeland Security)...
I am not a number - I am a free man!
ignore
As some people said, this is old news. There is currently a ham in Iowa who is filing a complaint with the FCC for repeated intentional interference - the usual communications act of 1934 and part 15 rules violations. This is the first official complaint that is going to the fcc so is the thing to watch. more info is at http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2004/06/15/2/ for anyone who wants to check it out.
I live in Northern Virgina, in fact, the very city that in all my research comes up as a huge test bed, Manassas. We were the first to have citywide BPL in use. I personally haven't looked into it, becuase I am a shortwave enthuist. BPL does basically work by broadcasting a wideband signal, 2 to 80mhz, over unshielded power lines. It also only affects those signals, wireless networking won't pick it up. The local agencies and authorties for the most part use 800mhz trunked systems, except for the local schoolboard which uses 45.32 mhz. Where my house is, with my outdoor antenna, on any given day I could pick up BBC clear as a bell, CHU on 7.335mhz, and any of the WWVB stations. I even enjoyed listening to HF hammers from around the world and even pirate stations. When BPL rolled out, I could tell you exactly what I got...static. Pure static, some signals pull through, but for the most part, they don't. Now, this might not be so bad if say, the power grid was underground..but there aren't too many places in this city the power lines are underground, maybe in a few of the new neighborhoods, but most everything is above ground. VHF isn't affected, the only repeaters I know of in this area are in the 150mhz HAM range, in fact, I don't even know if there are any licensed hams on the HF band because they're really not necessary with the propragation of that particular band. basically all that's really out is the HF band, which a lot of hammers use, and one I enjoyed listening to, but what gets me is the FCC is licensing this technology despite the impact it already has on licensed services. I'm sure a lot of us can go through and pull minor petty infractions that limited new technology, biggest example...56K modems.... 56k modems can't run at the full 56k because they might interfere with other services, but they're going to allow a possibly massive broadband pipe to disrupt an entire band....what kind of message are they pushing?