Slashdot Mirror
Gigabit Transfer Rates Over Power Lines?
nomrniceguy writes "Penn State engineers, Pouyan Amirshahi and Mohsen Kavehrad, estimated in a research paper released Wednesday that their system could deliver data at close to one gigabit per second over medium-voltage electrical lines in ideal conditions, with speeds of hundreds of megabits per second available to home users.
Their system would uses repeaters placed every one kilometer, (0.62 miles) and requires power lines to have been modified to reduce interference with the data signals. The engineers said their estimates were based on computer models, and that the data speeds available in a real-world version would depend on how many repeaters a power company used."
When they have a real world proof of concept, then I'll care...
Any idea about what kind of modulation they are planning ? QAM ?
- People who believe other people have no right to live, got no right to live ...
> Their system would uses repeaters placed every one kilometer.
And I would likes to get first post.
What would the hams do then?
RFI?
But does it run Linux?
uhuh. And this will likely be available only in the largest metro areas first, then 5 years later in the suburbs of said metro area.. so I'm looking at a good 15 years till this gets out to the woods where I live. Oh well, I guess I should just be happy that I have cable modem available.
Don't Tread on Me
Wasn't there a similar article in the papers a few months back?
Anyway, the article doesn't give all that munch information...I wonder how the price and reliability currently compare to cable.
Twenties Retirement
Just curious. When is this broadband service over power lines supposed to be available to the public? I keep hearing and reading about this technology, but I haven't seen it completed and deployed yet.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
by the time they finish all the testing and modifying the existing power line, gigabit wifi will be readily available.
This Sig is removed due to factual inaccuracy
To rig up all the shielding and the repeaters every kilometer. Sounds really expensive
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." - C.S. Lewis
The engineers said their estimates were based on computer models, and that the data speeds available in a real-world version would depend on how many repeaters a power company used.
Even if this system can be as good as these Engineers seem to think, it never will be, as the power company will only place repeaters at locations that can cover the most area, leave people on the outskirts with minimum service at the same price, just as current broadband companies do.
I do however doubt that we'll see this any time soon, as the article stated they would also have to alter/replace many existing lines in order to implement it. One of the key reasons this was ever considered in the first place was that it could use lines that already existed.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
Let me guess; the modification is to glue a fibre-optic cable onto it.
It could possibly serve some extremely remote areas where there simply are no other options, though still someone has to pay for it, and I expect even a DS3 would be cheaper.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Any day now...
Was not the basic problem of data transmission over power lines that every street lamp or a household appliance had a potential of broadcasting the transmited data in a pretty strong radio signal?
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
so what I'm reading here is that if this were actually implemented ITRW, it would be a massively expensive project that would ultimately give end users bandwith that might be keen competition for AOLs 56k dialup service - of course in the tradition of networking sales lingo this would be advertised as "gigabit powerline connection speed"
- "that's not a fuse, that's my firewall!"
ôó
Instead of spending all the money to rig up all the power lines to support this technology, and potentially causing substantial problems with interference to radio communication (particularly amateur), why not just spend the money on a stronger fiber infrastructure, which presumably can support a great deal more bandwidth than this, and doesn't have the problems with causing or recieving such interference. Why not keep our data and power networks separate, and optimize both for their specific purpose?
HAMs: Over our dead bodies.
Power Co,: Hey, look Gigabit over powerlines!
HAMs: Arggh! The inteference!
Power Co,: Oh, okay. We'll install Megabits over powerlines.
HAMs: Thankyou!
Penn State engineers, Pouyan Amirshahi and Mohsen Kavehrad, estimated in a research paper released Wednesday that their system could deliver data at close to one gigabit per second over medium-voltage electrical lines in ideal conditions
Though Amirshahi did mention that in order to provide anything faster then modem speeds to actual home users would require lowering the mean temperature of the earth to near absolute zero.
Power lines are ugly enough without even more crap hanging off them.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I'm pretty skeptical that this is practical but to be fair there's not yet information available to judge.
Their work was presented yesterday at the IEEE 2005 Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, session N5. If nothing else, the paper will be available when the conference proceedings are published.
I would be more interested in opening up the cable monopoly (in a similar manner to what happened to AT&T and the baby Bells). Fiber to the house would be cool too. This does seem like a good idea for rural areas though.
"brxref
...but one can only hope that as we gradually update our (america's) power infrastructure, things like this will be added. However, one wonders how many regional power outages we will need before we do this... but until we do begin a massive overhaul of the grid, something like this will only be an added benefit of such an overhaul.
webpage
Does it seem that broadband over power is outedging the other technologies? Which is ahead now? Discuss.
I'm sorry if this might sound a bit off topic but wouldn't the maintenance of powerlines be less expensif if north americans would do like in some middle-east countries and have the powerlines go underground?
In Theory...communism works.
When will they be able to transfer 1.21 gigabits/ second?
Repeaters every .62 miles and modifying the power lines seems way too expensive. What is needed is a cheap way of providing broadband to people in remote areas.
I'd like my sine wave nice and clean, thank you. I'd also like less EM in the air.
http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/
Well, its a great idea, but what happens if a repeater breaks? The system goes out. What about drunken hicks in the country who see a new target since the transformers are too explosive? What would the cost be to modify the existing powerlines? The repeaters, at say 2 houses apiece, would be an initial cost of $10 a person? The cost makes this plan outrageously expensive per house for nominal service. Regardless of speed, nobody would get such a erratically working product for the price it would take to make a profit. As the article said, nobody buys it because of high cost and low reliability. Billy
We're just equip our elite guards with repeaters (as in the rifle) and force out peons to carry portable hard drives and run really fast around the globe.
read the bunni comic
...called Enron Encoding. Anyone know anything about it?
Previous boradband-over-powerline issues were snubbed because of interference with radio communications.
Is this a new technique that helps solve that problem?
On the other hand the technique perhaps could be useful in the home to eliminate needs for separate network runs - current ethernet over power is kind of slow (around 802.11b speeds, I think - or a bit slower).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Gone.
There is no money in providing a good service at a low price- but there is money in getting the government to pay you for nothing. Lots of it.
Unless you can find a some way to massively increase the amount of physical space in the RF spectrum, gigabit wifi will never be practical.
First, these guys make the movie Pouyan & Mohsen Go to White Castle and now they know how to deliver gigbait over power lines? Whoa!
As a person employed in this industry I've done a bit of research on this topic. Basically one of the major challeges next to powerline interference is the cost of putting a bypass on the transformers. The signal being sent tends to be blocked by the coils.
There have been a number of solutions implemented such as using a bypass for the signal or Wireless to send the signal across the coils but they tend to be expensive. If you have a large number of transformers and have to retrofit each of them with a bypass then you could end up with a huge cost. Especially in places like Canada where we tend to have less customers per transformer than a place like Europe.
If a cheap solution can be devised though the benefits of such a solution could be huge. Having automated meter reading and providing internet service to customers can be a boon in cost savings and additional revenue streams (but of course retrofiting the meters also costs alot as some of the cheapest solutions I've seen on the market cost 1000 dollars per meter).
I hope some innovative person comes up with a solution to this problem someday in a cost effective manner. The coverage that a power company has for a customer base easily rivals that of the telecom industry and with more choice comes cheaper ISP rates due to the added competition.
If you guys won't RTFA fine, but at least read the summary. This scheme includes modifications of the lines to eliminate the interference problems.
Now debate the costs of replacing the lines, debate the speed, debate whether it's ethical to send nude shots of your gf over the same lines the power Grandma's toaster. But for the love of god quite repeating the same damn statement about RFI again and again!
A) It needs to be frequently repeated in the real world.
B) Sending data over unshielded high voltage lines is messy.
C) It uses very low frequencies where even the slightest signal leaks can interfere with radio's hundreds and thousands of miles away.
Most BPL trials in the US have been a disastaster. It is a "marketing technology"
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Why is this continually pressed? why do we continue to hear about this crap technology long after it has been shown to be harmful? It will interfere with many radio services, is expensive to implement, won't be cost efective in the rural areas it was touted as being beneficial for, and won't provide performance comparable to existing technologies..well then there's this..gigabit? well, i just don't believe it.
And all the professors were either german or american.
So they have indian guys on campus claiming they have gigabit speed. Back in my day, the American professor would have done it, but they would have had ZIGabit speed.
Goddamn red indians. Ooo boo boo boo.
wher'es the 1-1 line goign with the broadband isdconnected to
This system would shoot AM radio in the head.
It would destroy any chance of using Ham radio near it.
It would be a disaster.
I know that you can hook up an AM radio transmitter to a rail road track and broadcast the whole lenght of the thing. This is very illegal because it bleeds on any one else using the same frequencies.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. We have a clear case of people trying to create something new just because they can. They don't seem to care if they tinkle on any other form of RF communication.
Coax or Fiber makes much more sense. But because power companies are run by very rich and powerful people, they will try to get on the bandwagon of providing bandwidth to the home.
If we are going to use RF frequencies in the open air, without the benifit of shielding then we should persue P2P wireless and a bittorrent type of system. Each person would have a node and the node would both transmit and recieve. People would know where you are based upon location, and then the data would be funneled to you with low-power transmitters that would work P2P.
there would be no need for a central hub. There might also be no way for any utility to charge you for this.
That is exactly why this kind of a system doesn't get built.
And at a neighboor hood you could have it all funnel into a local broadband internet for a bunch of houses. The antennas would be directional and beam directly between each other.
Let's all hope that this idea of using the unshielded powerlines to transmit data is shot down by the FCC.
There's already a trial in Australia for IP over powerlines at 200Mb/s. Article at http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php?id=1826952 087&fp=2&fpid=1
Read reviews of shopping cart software
We will be just 0.21 jigabits of power shy of what's needed for time travel.
Cool.
If you're going to place gigabit repeaters on power lines, why not go wireless in Ka-band and just power through the rain? You certainly have enough power.
Seastead this.
This would defintely be more expensive in the long run compared to fiber. Also there are too many unknowns. Close to one gigabit per second? How close? What about the "ideal" conditions? Are we talking about weather conditions, wire conditions, ??? Requires that power lines be modified? I'm sure the electric companies are just itching for a reason to replace all of those lines.
Fiber is already here. It's faster, immune to all interference, and constantly getting cheaper. Wait, did I mention that fiber's faster?
-Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I have heard and read so many times about data over powerlines, I'm getting bored of it now. When I can buy it and use it, then I'll be interested.
We've been reading these power line data transmission stories for how long now? And how many are up and running?
Lets not post any more until we have a part number, price and delivery date.
Wireless power -- that would be interesting.
Upgrading current power lines ?
When you are at it, you may more conveniently draw optic fibers or data only dedicated copper lines along the power lines.
Léa Gris
Hmmm... This got me thinking. Could one use RFID, to receive rf and store in a capacitor? - Is not the premise of RFID that the RFID itself carries no power but is only activated by it? Could you store energy in a capacitor using RFID (Active) Scanners along power/telephone lines?
It does. Unfortunately when i plugged in my box, the Tux on my wallpaper looked scorched for some reason. I still can't understand why... :-?
Their system would uses repeaters placed every one kilometer
How the hell do they plan to power repeaters every 1km? They'll have to build a whole set of power lines just to.. oh wait.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
In Cincinnati, OH, at least. They started trials last March, and are slowly moving it into new neighborhoods.
My first job was with a remote electrical meter reading company in 1995. When I was there we heard all sorts of stories and rumours about Power Line Carrier (PLC) MODEMS, we even had one in our office.
The problems have always been the same: a) reliability, b) getting the signal to go through transformers, c) not causing massive interference to everyone else (EMC issues).
These stories keep coming and going while everyone is creating greater communcation technologies based on DSL and wireless in the meanwhile.
Perhaps they should just give it a rest.
..Always seems to go the way of parachute pants before they get mainstream appeal, remember rfc3251.x42.compower over ip or, in a quirky twist of events, http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,114793,0 0.asp
networking over power lines. They all seemed as great as broadband over power lines, but never really caught on due to a number of reasons. All of these technologies just seem to go bust for several diffrent reasons, be it being nervous about putting power through that crappy old enet cable, or the potential cost of implementation,
Isn't the real value of the power companies the right-of-way they possess for all of these power lines ?
Why would they install repeaters every 1 km ? I just can't believe that it would be that much cheaper to do that instead of just running fiber next to the power lines instead.
Then you'll get > 1GBs without even breathing hard, you'll only need a repeater about every 20km or so, and there will not be any RFI/EMI problems.
Power lines make _terrible_ communication channels.
Absolute statements are never true
This may not be the same thing...data rates in excess of 1 Gigabit require bandwidth in excess of 2 GigaHertz. The BPL that is causing radio users (such as hams and public safety and other users) such fits uses the spectrum from roughly 2 to 70 MHz. That's 68MHz wide and can carry roughly 38 Megabits per power line.
If the power company solution used a frequency range that was entirely contained within the multi-GHz band, for example, there would be no interference in the critical "high frequency" 3-30Mhz spectrum that has special properties of world-wide propagation due to the ionosphere.
So let's not rush to judgement on all network technologies that could be deployed on power lines...those that use microwave or UHF frequencies might not have the same interference problems.
The ARRL does not have opposition to all technology -- just those that have been shown to be problematic and the problems swept under the rug by the FCC.
Been hiding under a rock? The fiber bubble burst. The obvious solution is to create a gigabit radio bubble.
Also, like all other "high-tech" services, it will most likely be offered only to downtowns and wealthy areas for the first phase. By the time it rolls out to all the surrounding suburbs and stretches into the woods, we will all have satellites linked directly with the antenna atop of our tin foil hats.
are transformers?? Data has not been able to be transmitted across a transformer as far as I know. Looking out on my street, I can see at least 2 transformers...
Nicolai Tesla demonstrated electrical power could be sent wirelessly, so why bother with all the equipment? Hell, just piggyback broadband on wireless power transmission! No wires, no repeaters every km, no grid to break down -- just one huge global RF field for porn and p2p for all! I want to instantaneously download everything into my iMac from a bolt of lightning from the sky... yeah, now THAT'S the internet I want...
Too bad we'd all have to walk around with tinfoil caps.
if you look at their names none of these guys are actually "westerners".
...cable and phone companies are working on a way to deliver power over cable.
Or why not just use the water system? In theory, it could be workable. At least in the future. Dunno about it being affordable, but it sure is environementally clean using water transport...
This is a fucking troll "extending the Internet", the idea that just becuase you have a power line means that you get can get BPL is no more reasonable than saying you can get DSL cause you have a phone line. They still need to run fiber almost all the way to your place and install an assload of equipment before you can get data. BPL will be the last technology to hit rural areas. What it will do, is polute the airwaves of the entire planet. So yes, it is pretty typical western mentality.
If you've got a town 40km from the nearest moderate-sized town, that's 29 repeaters. How much revenue do you think they'd be pulling in from way-out-there hicks? Enough to pay for 29 repeaters?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Representative Matsui, who died of cancer this past week, was most definitely American even though, to a bigot like you, "Matsui" did not sound "Western". Get off your high horse, bigot.
NO it doesn't! RFI is a serious issue and may still be a serious one with their plan. Try actually reading the article yourself before yelling at others.
Quote: "requires power lines to have been modified to reduce interference with the data signals."
They aren't talking about reducing outward interference with other radio devices, they are only talking about reducing interference between the power lines and the data they want it to carry. There is no mention I could find talking about reducing RFI problems.
Klein bottle for rent - inquire within.
I do not see the cost effectivness of broadband over power lines.
It is not there; neither in rural or metropolitan markets. I work for a broadband company that is a subsidiary of a large power utility. Our nickname for BPL is "BTBW" (broadband over twisted barbed wire). The point being, you can put a signal across most anything -- as long as you do not care about speed nor interference! Your power lines are already carrying low-speed data in many cases for in-line transmission management. The problem with radiofrequency physics is that of how antennas work. Ask your local amateur radio friend about long-wire antennas and you'll soon discover that power lines are essentially the same thing. Wonder why your AM radio acts funny when you drive under a high voltage line? Imagine if that line wasn't just emitting 60 Hz, but everything MF to low-VHF?
Shortwave radio would cease to exist. Amateur radio HF would be gone. All the communication going on right now for the tsunami assistance efforts would be shot - causing many people to die. AM radio would be useless at night and anywhere outside of the city during the day. But hey, some power company CEO might be happy.
BPL causes so much interference that it is useless in urban areas. In rural areas, it still interfers , but now has the disadvantage of being more expensive than simply running fiber out to the residence (at $17.5K/mile for rural fiber deployments).
Really, because the cost of rural fiber is less, a power company would be smarter to use existing facilities and deploy fiber along the same poles. Now you have much greater capacities than BPL will ever provide, are using existing right-of-ways to reduce costs significantly, etc.
Innovations like fiber over ground - where the fiber optic is carried on the top ground cable of the transmission system; ground wires are necessary to take lightning strikes away from the transmission line, but do not affect the fiber inside - make this easy for us. And we can go 40-50 miles depending upo the fiber mode used without repeaters, not 600-900 feet or less per BPL. Best of all, it is cheaper than BPL and does not interfer with the entire radiofrequency spectrum.
So ask yourself when you hear a power utility talking about BPL why they would do it. Some seem to think the investors might be fooled by the idea of converting an old power line into a broadband carrying line with little effort (I have a sky hook to sell these people). The reality is that until we change the laws of physics, an antenna will act like an antenna, and that is what a power line is. BPL will be horribly expensive and cause other RF services to cease to exist.
Run, don't walk, from power utilities that talk up BPL.
[Judge, to Bells]: "Hello, Pot. I'd like you to meet a friend of mine, Kettle."
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Until one morning you wake up and realize your microwave has a ton of spyware installed, your toaster has a nasty virus that causes your toast to come out with, "LOL!?! WTF!!!" burn marks and your radio's volume is stuck on full blast asking if you would like a guaranteed 3 inch penis enlargement.
Do you know what people would do with 100s of megabits per second? Even 10s of megabits per second! MPAA and RIAA, hold on to your lawyers, and watch those movies and songs fly!!!
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Transmitting data over power lines introduces another danger factor in the maitenance equation. Most electricians I know prefer to have a switch between themselves and the power company.
The only advantage I see is that natural selection should start weeding out the idiot cable guys.
As proud as I am that 'dear old state' is involved in this reasearch, it seems likely that it would only serve a small niche in the broadband market, much like satellite broadband.
As for why we in the US don't have fast and cheap broadband available to the home user is simply because the cable/phone companies won't let us. They have no reason to sell Fast and Cheap when our only alternatives are Slow and Expensive.
...get interrupted by an unlucky squirrel.
There's a sicknening reality to this. I used to bitch about having mediocre power from Omaha Public Power District (OPPD). They were pretty slow getting to the problem and I had encounters where they'd get there, only to sit around for three hours waiting for a "safety foreman" to show before they could restore power. In retrospect, I was just impatient like most power customers.
Then I moved to MidAmerican Energy territory. Oh my god. Serious, total suck time. Treynor Iowa (east of Omaha) has gone down at least a half dozen times this year for, um, squirrels, bunnies, sunny days, a cloud, etc. They joke about outlawing rodents because apparently their appearance causes half the county to suddenly not have power. My little town lost power three times this fall - for hours at a time - for nothing anyone could ever figure out. MidAmerican doesn't tell usually (you have to find a lineman to share the secrets, apparently). Someone told me that Warren Buffet (fat cat second richest guy in the world or something that lives in Omaha who tries to convince people he's a nice little guy, but if you knew him and his "family" you'd know better) and his company, which own Midamerican Energy, have been doing the Gorden Gecko on their maintenance. You know the Wall Street Movie where the guy slaughters the company to sell it off in pieces. Since the linemen say the same thing (one truck on call to cover two counties on weekends), I kind of wonder.
The funniest one was this last September. I was working in my shed and needed more light. (I live on a farm a couple miles down the road from my little town). I grabbed my dual-500 watt halogen and plugged it in. On... OFF! Crap. Thought I popped the breaker. Reset it. Nope. Whole damn panel was down. Went to the pole outside my shed and reset. Nothing. Went to the main pole that feeds my outbuildings. Reset. Nothing.
Turns out my plugging in a light TOOK AN ENTIRE COUNTY DOWN! We were down throughout Monday night football. Didn't get up until 10:30. What did MidAmerican Energy say? Nothing. They don't even call you back when you select the callback option. So apparently using 1000 watts is enough to shut an entire county down. Holy freaking cow.
I've asked one of their engineers why their power is, um, so, um, not reliable. His answer? "You live in the country. What did you expect?"
I pray my Internet never, ever depends upon these complete fools.
It's a pity the original poster felt a need to tell us that a kilometer was 0.62 mile. Are Americans so unaware of metric units that even slashdotters need to be reminded of the conversion back to English units? With most of the rest of the world using the MKS (metric) system, it's just a shame that Americans have been too stubborn and incapable of adopting it as well.
Who needs this data transmission over power lines? No one in North America!
There are millions of meters of 'dark fiber' in the ground already. This is the ultra high bandwidth fiber optic cable that was put in place quietly by the utilities during the boom years of the 1990s. It was all this unused fiber-optic capacity that gave rise to all the talk about video-on-demand and other high bandwidth predictions at the time.
Maybe somewhere, someday, somebody could make use of this technology. But for the present, it's just an academic exercise.
The problem with getting bandwidth into use in North America isn't technological, nor is it the lack of installed cable. It's political. Everybody involved is just too damned greedy and the end result is that nothing much happens. It's like crabs pulling each other back to the bottom of the bucket.
My system could deliver data at close to one gigabit per second over barbed wire in ideal conditions, with speeds of hundreds of megabits per second available to home users. My system requires barbed wire to have been modified to reduce interference with the data signals.
>What would the hams do then? >>Food would be a problem so thay should get glazed. lol!!
SOMEONE FIGURE OUT HOW TO USE THE SEWERS FOR BROADBAND!
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Important Stuff
# Please try to keep posts on topic.
# Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads.
# Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
# Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
# Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
# If you want replies to your comments sent to you, consider logging in or creating an account.
Now when the power goes down, my internet connection goes down too. Morons!
Ummm...
Shit... now instead of getting Windows infected with every virus known to man (including polio) within 10 minutes of connecting to the intraweb, we can get it infected within 10 minutes of turning it on!
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
"To rig up all the shielding and the repeaters every kilometer. Sounds really expensive"
REALLY expensive... after four hurricanes!
~me
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/n7vbw/nwarrl/letters .htm
Just a quick post to say that there is a Trail in Australia using Broadband over powerlines It was a success link is here http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php?id=1826952 087&fp=2&fpid=1
"If sleep was a drug, then I have withdrawal symptoms" http://computerdreams.blogspot.com
Ambient Completes First Project in New York City
r =1
Tuesday October 26, 10:25 am ET
First to Commercially Deploy Second Generation Chipset Technology in North America
MADRID, SPAIN and NEWTON, MA--(MARKET WIRE)--Oct 26, 2004 -- Ambient Corporation (OTC BB:ABTG.OB - News), a leader in Power Line Communications (PLC) and a featured exhibitor at the IQPC International Powerline Communications Conference in Madrid announced today the successful completion of its joint project with Consolidated Edison (NYSE:ED - News) in the installation of a communications system in Con Edison's new First Avenue Steam Tunnel in Manhattan.
Kevin Burke, President of Con Edison, said, "We are pleased with the results of the project and its cost effectiveness. This state-of-the-art monitoring and communications system will serve us well."
Ambient, the first US company to incorporate the latest chipset from DS2 into its system, utilized DS2's second generation PLC technology, capable of running at speeds up to 200 Mbps, to build a multi-purpose communications network in an industrial environment. The network is utilized in Con Edison's new tunnel to monitor environmental conditions, the state of the steam main, and to provide telephony service in the tunnel utilizing the voice over IP (VoIP) technology provided by the DS2 chipset. This single network is a cost-effective solution that provides a variety of services that would traditionally have required multiple technologies and wiring systems.
MORE: http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/041026/074896.html?printe
... with the 60 cycle hum that already comes through my speakers, if we add in lots of digital information too, I won't need to download the latest Aphex Twin album from BitTorrent, I can just listen to the bizarre noises that come out of my speakers because my neighbor is downloading pr0n.
Clue: All signals are waves. (Fourier)
Clue #2: All electrical signals are electromagnetic waves. (Ampere)
Clue #3: Electromagnetic waves are not contained in fields, they are the fields and the fact that that energy has formed a field means that it is no longer in the wire. (Faraday)
Clue #4: To keep these waves from forming fields of radiation, we can place an opposing (balanced) wave near it, twisting it occasionally (twisted pair), or we can place it in a faraday cage (coax).
Clue #5: Neither of these methods are used with power lines.
How much interference is released appears to be very debatable.
Clue #6: How much interference is released can be calculated, or observed through experimentation.
Clue #7: "Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." (Feynman)
is no more reasonable than saying you can get DSL cause you have a phone line.
or saying you can get broadband Internet cause you can see satellites in the sky. ever wonder why satellite internet hasn't owned the entire market? everyone can see it!!! wtf?
turns out some nasty thing called physics messes up the whole plan. speed of light, you know, only goes so fast. takes a couple of seconds for a signal to get up to a bird (satellite) and back down. and then there's the crappy little receiver at your house. unless you pay $20,000 or so, you just can't get a good earth station to shoot your signal back. so you have two points of suck.
the result is that satellite internet is ungodly slow on uploads (worse than dialup which is why most actually use dialup for the return path), and has such terrible latencies that you cannot game on it or use it for vpn. only fast web pages, delayed 2+ seconds.
bpl is no different. it suffers laws of physics like satellite. power lines are antennas. frequencies are already used, assigned and owned. try to broadcast all over everyone else and you have problems.
I always thought the gas company using pipes as
wave guides would be more likely to succeed.
Wish I had some of that money.
Ref
Implementing this is impractical. No one wants to re-fit the current system... wait. No one wants to pay for the current system to be re-fitted. The cable plant from the phone company can't handle that kind of voltage, and splicing repeaters into those cables? Forget about it. It took the phone company 5 years to start removing bridge tap and load coils for the latest 2-wire and 4-wire high speed services.
As much as the power utilities might want to gain more revenue, they don't want to spend billions cleaning up every noisy transformer, or splicing in repeaters and filters. Can you imagine what happens when Archie Bunker fires up his 1968 Vintage Vacuum cleaner, and the motor noise takes out the neighborhood's internet connection? Those are the kind of complaints that the utilities are going to have to chase down.
Possibly, if you were building out a brand new complex, someone might say, "Hey, we have the opportunity to do it!" You might find someone willing to try it. Pull some fiber to the neigborhood, and then Cat 5 or Coax. You'll get plenty of bandwidth. Even fiber to the home....
-- No sig for you!
The ABB-installed high voltage line in Thailand actually had fibre running through a conductor when it was installed in the early 90s. It's the safest place, inside a metal cable. If the electricity industry had really been forward thinking, they might now be in a position to eat the telco's lunches. But too many industries thought the Internet would be a passing geek fad.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
When Nicolas Tesla claimed that electricity can be had by poking a rod into the ground "anywhere" in the world, he was right. Thomas Edison pooh-poohed the idea as unworkable. Nevertheless, Westinghouse wasted their corporate dollars on Nicolas's invention rights to no avail.
But never did Nicolas (nor Thomas) realized that massive Tesla generators would caused repoduction disruption amongst biological entities as well as actual constipation (and who knows what other side effects, because it was never put into mass production, thank God!)
It goes to show that BPL is just another one of mankind's technological follies in which I predict will only go to further reinforce Stockholm's electromagnetic radiation field just as potentially biologically harmful as the infamouse Telsa Coils.
It's called Fiber To The Home. In the long run, it's the only thing that's good enough. Everything else is stalling. So enough talk about broadband over powerlines, DSL 2, wireless broadband and other crap. Start laying fiber to that last mile so we can all have decent broadband. AND MAKE IT SYMMETRICAL YOU GREEDY BASTARDS! Where is a government when you need one...I wonder if all the money spent in Iraq would've been enough to hook up all the U.S population with fiber. Food for thought
for high voltage over Ethernet.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
" requires power lines to have been modified to reduce interference with the data signals."
Am I supposed to read that as meaning hundreds of thousands of miles of cable have to have gadgets put on every pole to make this work?
Right, I can see the power companies jumping to do this...
(And yes, I know they're interested in becoming ISPs, but I doubt this expense will help...)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Nope, the speed of light isn't the problem.
The speed of light is 300000 km/s. Geostationary orbit is at 35786 km. That is, for the signal to go up and back down you lose 237ms. Really bad for something like Quake, but not all that horrible for web browsing/downloading.
I've heard satellite internet has often latencies in the order of seconds though, so there's got to be something else there.
PECO Electric (now part of Exelon) did that, in conjuntion with Adelphia. The result, which is now known as Telcove (after changing its name from PECO/Hyperion to Peco/Adelphia to Adelphia Business Systems to Peco Telcove to Telcove) was one of the few profitable pieces of Adelphia.
It's not the technology....
It's politics.
The government through an act in congress mandates that ALL homes have phone and electricity lines pulled to them no matter (just about) where they are.
There is no requirement for either cable or fiber. As long as this situation remains the same, I can pretty much bet that anybody that can't get cable will NEVER get broadband! The little copper wire for phone, big electric wire and satelite is all the options they will ever have.
Unless a national fiber inititive is done through congress where the same requiements for electricity and phone are applied to network fiber cable, a large part of the U.S. will probably be bandwidth starved.
There is of course the hope of some exotic wireless technology..maybe
If receiving amateur radio (ham) stations in Australia and elsewhere had been anywhere near a BPL service, then the only communications link from several locations affected by the recent tsunami would not have worked.
BPL jams shortwave radio. Shortwave radio is long range radio and is what gets used both when people want to chat or beep at each other over great distances for fun and education, but also when disaster strikes and help is required.
http://www.current.net 1) does not interfear with HAM radio. 2) Is being deplyed as we speak. 3) has speeds comparible if not faster than Cable/DSL.
cabling and active electronic repeaters every KM compete in cost with simply laying the same amount of optical fiber, which has 1000x the capacity today, can easily go 70 or more KM, is proven technology, and doesn't interfere with RF devices?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
- There may be actual live people that are used to using the same bandwidth for their radio hobby. They tend to be able to write to legislators whenever somebody steps on their turf. Add this to your model.
- There are other signal generators on the power grid, such as lightning storms, old flourescent lights, body shops with arc welders, clinics with diathermy machines, millions of homes with vacuum cleaners, shavers, electric trains, trolleys, light dimmers, touch-lamps. Add these to your model.
- There are signal attenuators on the power grid: power transformers, surge surpressors, outlet strips, computer power supplies, whatchacallem, capacitor banks. Add these too.
By the time you add reasonable amounts of these other factors, your usable bandwidth is down to a few bits per second, AND legislators are proposing bills to shut down your plans.There was also a trial in Manchester about 6 years ago.
The speeds were impressive for the time (~10Mb/s downstream) but it was too expensive for the struggling utility company (Norweb) to continue to run.
They had tried to attain a partnership with BT, but were snubbed as BT was in the process of starting their DSL rollout.
I'd prefer having things the other way 'round: power over telephone, cable or fiber.
Great... so next time there's a blackout because some tree falls on the powerlines, or some punk teenager greaks into the local substation while high and fries himself, I lose my net connection too... ...although, come to think about it, a net connection probably isn't any good without power (unless you got a laptop or UPS).
Would be handy if you could route a power surge to a given IP address though (people would think twice about spamming with smoke pouring from their box)...
Meh... move along folks, nothing to read here...
Do you think it will be enough to overload this server ?
t ml /index.php
http://82.225.141.143/index.php?page=/var/www/h
Well, don't forget it has to go up to the stellite, down to the connection to the real internet, through that to the destination and back, then up to the satillite and back down again to you. You have to double your estimate and then add the regular latencies.
Dig out your old university textbooks and re-read about transmission lines and antennas. Power lines are optimised for maximum energy throughput {regardless of waveshape distortion; as long as the voltage spends as much time below zero as it does above, most appliances will cope fine} with a bandwidth of 49.99Hz to 50.01Hz {and that's allowing a greater margin for error than real life}. All the power companies really care about is that most of the joules they feed into the wires end up in whatever's on the other end of them. On the other hand, communication lines should be optimised for minimum waveshape distortion {generally with scant regard for energy loss; unless said loss be in the form of RF radiation, in which case it is strongly discouraged} over as wide a bandwidth as necessary. The signal coming out must be a faithful reproduction of that sent in, without overshooting or rounding-off on the peaks and troughs {like you see with a 10:1 oscilloscope probe that isn't adjusted properly}. It matters less if the signal gets attenuated; after all, it can always be amplified, but the shape once changed is changed forever.
..... The two ways to reduce radiation are to have a coaxial cable {power lines aren't} or to have two parallel cables carrying signals in inverse phase to each other, so the two radiated signals will annihilate one another {or, whatever each one radiates, the other will pick straight back up}. This is why Ethernet cables are twisted, to keep the two conductors close together even despite you bending the cable. On the other hand, 50Hz has a wavelength of 6Mm {yes, six megametres}, and I'm not even sure there's a big enough bit of land actually to fit that much cable across -- the circumference of the Earth is only 40Mm. Compared to that, the conductors of a power line are practically in intimate contact; but at high frequencies, they're nowhere near each other, and they will radiate.
Whilst it would not be impossible to design a transmission line to be low-loss at distribution frequencies and high-fidelity at higher frequencies, it's as near to a certainty as damn it is to swearing that such a design would differ radically from existing power lines. By which I mean that it'd take less cash, less effort and return better results, both in the short term and the long term, to lay brand-spanking-new optical fibres than to try to adapt the existing power lines to carry data.
And no laboratory-scale experiment will ever show up the problems that occur in real-life situations, because those problems only occur with long cables spaced far apart {"long" and "far" meaning in relation to wavelength}. If the cable is less than a wavelength, you can pretty much pretend it is an ideal transmission line. Beyond that you have to start taking into account transmission line phenomena {think of ringing a bell with an elastic rope}. And radiation
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
rather than BPL. BPL will cause all kinds of interference, at the frequencies it operates, with a lot of other things. Namely, shorwave radios, but your RC cars and CB radios as well. With directional microwave dishes on the ground and omni's on the blimp, the interference will be much less.
And it frees up the power companies, because Christ knows they have a tough enough time just providing power.
This most likely wasn't broadband over powerlines in the sense of this article. It was probably more along the line of an apartment LAN over the building's power grid, with the actual broadband coming in on a different system, such as a fractional T1, and they had a closet with more modems hooked up to the power wires going to the individual apartments.
They've had systems for years that can run 10 mbit ethernet or so through the powerlines in a house. It would save alot of effort versus running more wire.
I don't read AC A human right
I've been staying in a hotel in Tukrey. The hotel has this for their internal network.
Here is some food for thought on BPL:
1. BPL signals will pollute ANY chunk of spectrum it uses. This is already evident in the 2-80 MHz bands that it's currently being tested in. The same thing would happen even if they shifted it to work in the 2-5 GHz band, the interference issue would still exist.
2. BPL CAN be interfered with, transmissions from any RF source be it CB, HAM or Public service can disrupt BPL service. How irate would you get if your BPL service was constantly disrupted by my LEGAL transmissions.
3. Placing RF coupling capacitors at the transformer to allow BPL signals into your home. NO THANKS. Now your otherwise "clean" AC power is now going to be filled with all kinds of other noise as well, arcing insulators / transformers, your neighbors arc welder etc come to mind. And let's not forget about lightening strikes and large static discharges.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
This really means that every source off off the power grid needs to be isolated via a capacitor bank to remove any harmonic effects from bad electrical/electronic devices.
The cost of the power companies to put in such filters is not cost competetive. It's still probably cheaper to just run a fiber line beside the power line.
My brother actually built a simple version of this back in the mid 90's as an RCC project where he made a distributed stereo system that went through the power lines of the house. It worked unless you used our microwave, blender, dimmers...
JsD
So, why pay for DSL when a coat hanger is free?
-- Just another unsolicited opinion... from the Peanut Gallery.
if they get the internet over the power lines that would be perfect for me becasue i live in the "country". I live in a township with about 200 people in the township and the closest house is a quarter mile away down a dirt road so this kind of internet service would be perfect for people like me
Not all residences and offices are served by existing broadband: cable or digital subscriber line technology. Furthermore, many of those who are served by only one of the two technologies pay regional monopoly prices. For these under served markets, Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) is an emerging alternative for fast Internet access. http://stellarlink.org/academic/bpl_kavanagh.pdf
"Their system would uses repeaters placed every one kilometer, (0.62 miles) and requires power lines to have been modified"
Yea, and if I made the power line into a Cat-5 cable, I could do this too.
ANY solution that requires a major rework of the electrical grid is dead on arrival. The power co's are just not going to foot the bill to change things around. Period.
I think you're missing the point.
Until analog RF is made unusable, people will keep using it.
Whoever the private investors who bought up all that dark fiber that was put in place in the last decade or two -- which is sitting there since Worldcom et al. tanked -- have to do something to force people to give up on free broadcast.
Compare the 1930s, when there were electric railroads in major urban areas -- and General Motors had to buy them up and close them down, before a market could be created for the private automobile.
Wrecking what's free to force people to what's paid isn't a mistake, it's a tactical marketing method.
Of course it's stupid and idiotic. I did say it's marketing. Look at the countries hit by the tsunami -- what's the only usable telecom that was on the air right away? Ham radio.
Yep.
Sign me "N6VSB"
If you have to modify the powerlines and have transmiters ever Km then you might as well just string fiber everywhere.
Double that again because you have to wait for a DNS request first.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Why not just piggyback fiber on the power poles? The right of way is already taken care of. Fiber doesn't conduct so it won't interfere with electricity delivery. You don't need insane uplink/downlink converters to safely access the power lines. It won't pollute the HAM spectrum. What am I missing here?
... what if amateur radio operators were forced to innovate new technologies to cut out the noise? There's some great stuff out there as far as DSPs go, but couldn't the technology be extended to get rid of much of the BPL noise? Maybe I just don't know much about HF operation (very likely), but it seems like the same old technologies have been used for a long time and there has been no major innovation since DSP. Yeah, it could render obsolete a lot of good old tube equipment (CQ BA!), but I thought one of the major principles behind amateur radio was innovation and technology development. Is that wrong?
In any communication channel, the data rate (as measured in bits per second) is proportional to bandwidth, and it kind of makes sense to confuse the two (it was originally a hacker joke). The problem is that they are really separate things. For example, plain old telephone has a bandwidth of a few kHz, but the data rate can be more than a few kbps if there is good signal to noise ratio. To be precise:
See also: Throughput vs Bandwidth and links on that page.Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
...a beowolf cluter of these?
Okay, first time I've used the cliché... mod me down if you must.