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BPL: The Internet's Fool's Gold
Joe Barr writes "One of the more fascinating tidbits of information I came across while researching this story on NewsForge about BPL, the fatally flawed wannabe-broadband-provider technology, was that at the very same time the FCC was downplaying the threat of the interference BPL creates, the FCC's very own test results were showing just the opposite."
Was Slashdot any better with its breathless stories about "The Myth of Radio Spectrum Interference", "The Illusion of Spectrum Scarcity", and so on?
RTFA. It explicitly states that power companies cannot become backbone providers because long-haul data gets killed by interference from transformers/repeaters. They can still drop leased lines to substations and last-mile it from there, but this in turn feeds those very same backbone providers the utilities seek to compete with . . .
Speaking of which - why arent the power companies themselves pushing for more active enforcement of the telecommunications act of 1996 regarding this issue? This seems like a perfect place to call it out - lines sold to utilities at forced wholesale prices could A) make them some money, B) hurt the telcos and C) make consumers happy.
It's a bad idea and has been dropped left and right. Here's a paper from Canada on BPL. And here's a counter proposal for those who feel that energy companies need to be in the network business: Broadband Over gas (apparently not a joke).
We're not just talking about ignorance - which can be excused in Government, as it's almost mandatory - we are in the realms of willful stupidity, as the results were known in advance.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The major obstacle is that it would blow HAM operators and emergency frequencies out of the water. Emergency services would have to start using smoke signals. It's as bad an idea as I can possibly imagine.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's circling the drain, but not dead yet. Most hams and shortwave listeners would love for it to go away, as would anyone who has to use the HF frequencies.
According to the section chief of the Ohio ARRL, problems are minimal.
(at the bottom of the article:) "Joe Phillips of Fairfield, the Ohio section chief for the American Radio Relay League, says that so far the Cinergy roll-out hasn't created the radio interference many ham radio operators had feared."
A clarification -
Yes, BPL interferes with Ham frequencies. But the FCC allocated emergency ranges are in fact higher on the RF spectrum, and are *not*, repeat *not* in any danger from BPL interference. Sure, it's not a great thing that Ham could be wiped out, but could the advocates please be honest stop trying to pretend that it'll hindre all emergency service communication in the process?
microcomputing? More work on hobby microcomputing was being done by hams than anyone else back in the 1970's. Anyone remember Wayne Green and '73? Which later spun off, directly or indirectly, Byte, Kilobaud and other fine publications. An amazing amount of technology has been pioneeered by the ham community. They are an asset that should not be thrown away carelessly. Given the chance, I am sure there will be many more innovations to come. Real ones, not the Microsoft kind.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
What about state police? or county firefighters? They have massive networks of repeaters setup across states so that all of the different emergency services can jump on and immediately ask for help from other agencies without having to go through a third party (dispatch). Many of these are HF and VHF simply because you need the range. These are the ones going to get hit by BPL interference.
Many state police agencies, and other state-level public agencies, use low-band VHF (30-50 MHz).
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Hope your a cable/satelite user. Channels 2-5 are in the range discussed in the article.
Maybe you can watch your neighbors porn on channel 2.
The people who listen to broadcast radio at these freqs might also be a tad hostile towards the interferance also.
Any navigation and ship to shore services left in this freq range?
Later he agrees that competition would be good for the consumer, but that BPL is not being faster, more reliable, or cheaper than conventional broadband access. But, he leave out the part about it being faster and more reliable than no access at all. Although I'll admit that BPL probably costs more than having no access at all. Finally he begins to selectively quote and reference FCC documents. He talks of notching and quotes a member of the ARRL (association for amateur radio) of which the author is also a member. The FCC data that he claims show that the likelihood of interference is not very low, actually shows the opposite for a properly notched systems. The report showed low to no interference with a an above ground properly notched system simply recommend that the notch be increase by 100kHz in the 10 meter band.
And for underground powerline systems, there were no caveats at all - the underground systems were always below the limit.
Why claim that the data proves something that it doesn't?
http://www.arrl.org/~ehare/bpl/FCC_reports.pdf
I see a lot of people badmouthing BPL or Amateur Radio over one-another. I'm an amateur radio operator, and I'd oppose BPL even if it didn't interfere with the amateur service (as some implementations don't: they notch out the amateur bands since the ARRL has been so vocal).
It really is a silly idea. Let's run MF/HF/VHF signals over this really long, unshielded wire to deliver internet to people's houses. Of course we can't actually get it to the house because of those pesky transformers, so we still need to retrofit our grid and use something else (like wifi) for the last 100 yards. Then there's that pesky issue of power lines being really bad transmission lines at those high frequencies (they're definately not constant impedence), so we'll have to throw a lot of power into those lines (at RF) to get the signal where we want it. What? It radiates? Hum, oh well.
The obvious solution is to string real transmission lines (like coax, twisted pair, or, obviously, fiber) along those poles (protected in some kind of harder casing) and underground. But that's expensive? Duh, retrofitting something meant to deliver huge amounts of energy at one frequency (50 or 60Hz, depending on your side of the pond) to deliver data at high rates of speed isn't going to be cheap. At least don't be half-assed about it.
Also, just so people know. The amateur service doesn't really have all the bandspace people make it out to have. Some bands are surprisingly small: the voice section of 17m, for example, is from 18.110MHz to 18.168MHz - only 58kHz of bandwidth, or enough for 20 single-sideband voice conversations if everyone plays *really* nice and lines up perfectly. There are giant posters like this one that show the major service to which each frequency band is allocated to in the US (many of which are also assigned internationally by ITU, at least down in HF). The first 3 rows (3kHz-30MHz) are the bands likely to be given problems by BPL. The amateur service is teal-green colored on that poster. Look for yourself how little is actually given to the service on many bands. 80m (3.5MHz) is about the only one that you're likely to even spot quickly below 30MHz!
Sure, fuck ham. However they are a small population of spectrum users who would be affected (they just happen to be the group who complained publically). Police, coast guard, other emergency services, etc. all regiatered complaints to the FCC regarding BPL.
Appearently they do not care that you were easily mislead by debunked "cheap broadband" claims that anyone with a freshman level EE knowledge could see through. I'm sorry you were so gullible, fortunatly it seems the rest of the world isn't.
Finkployd
As someone who has been involved in the BPL to some degree, I can assure you that the BPL is a political scam that was never meant to be deployed on any significant scale.
In the past, FCC required local owners of cable and phone infrastructure (baby-Bells, Verizons of the world, etc) to share access to their wires in a non-discriminatory fashion to avoid "monopolistic" behaviour. Both local DSL and cable operators lobbied heavily and successfully to strike this "mandatory non-discriminatory sharing" provision from FCC rules. BPL was proclaimed a "third alternative broadband technology" that in theory should prevent monopoly or duopoly in residential broadband. The trick is that BPL is not competitive with cable or DSL and, thus, will unlikely be deployed at all. BPL push in FCC was a smoke-screen to enable baby-Bells to monopolize DSL and existing cable owners to monopolize cable broadband accordingly.
More such papers are available from David Reed's Open Spectrum page.
But hey, it isn't my field.
The wavelength of any broadband is so minute, compared to ehter the 50 Hz of UK mains, or 60 Hz in the US, that there should be no real difference in the nature of the interference or what it interferes with.
Having said that, the amount of interference is a product of the current squared, IIRC, which DOES mean that you would get a difference there. IIRC, the UK uses a higher voltage but a lower current, so the interference in the UK should be less than that in the US.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Look at a frequency allocation chart. The ham bands make up a teeny tiny part of HF and low VHF. The rest is used for marine, aviation, broadcasting and loads of commercial purposes.
And BPL is not a 21st century technology. It's a misguided attempt to use 19th century technology (AC wires) for something they were never designed for, totally wiping out the HF spectrum in the process so it can't be used for anything else.
If you want broadband, use telephone wires, coax, or optical fibre. Or microwave dishes. Not random pieces of copper wire designed to carry 60 Hz power.
I can not speak for the blocking of TCP port 80. However as a systems administrator at an ISP, I can assure you that the ISP is justified in blocking out bound TCP port 25.
With the increase of SPAM on the Internet, providers are being more strict with other ISPs that fail to police their IP space for open relays and viruses. A single spammer from one of your netblocks is often enough to get ALL of your net blocks black listed by other ISPs. As a result ISP's are being forced to restrict outbound access to services such as SMTP in order to protect the majority of subscribers that do not host services.
If you would like to send email from your server, configure it to relay out bound e-mails through your ISP's SMTP servers. This allows the ISP to catch surges before remote ISPs start complaining.
Some ISPs, even offer special packages at no additional cost that do not have these restrictions, however they may require that you demostrate techincal competency to use a filterless service. Since a large number of people do not properly lock down SMTP relays or actively check for viruses.
To sum up, at my company it is not about thinking that you should not host services, but that we want to insure that your services will not impact the other 99.99% of our subscriber's access to the Internet.
Haha! I hate to be the one to tell you this, but even if BPL is rolled out to 99% of the world, you will be in the 1% that won't ever get it.
ISDN, T-1, Satellite, dual-line dial-up. You have a lot of options for broadband, they just don't happen to be terribly cheap. If I was in your place, I would probably start up a broadband company, based on microwave transmitters/recievers.
But the real issue here is that having broadband is nice, but far from necessary. And HAMs aren't just kids playing around with several thousands of dollars worth of radio equipment, they serve an important role. It's BPL that is stomping all over other radio signals, not the other way around, and it should not be rolled out until/unless they can solve that problem.
"Dear Slashdot, I live on a coral island in the middle of the Pacific ocean, and the only way for me to get broadband is to drain all the water out of the ocean, but those damn environmentalists keep trying to stop me."
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The FCC was using BPL as a substitute for real competition. Powell's policy -- Martin has not made his positions clear yet -- was that telephone wires belonged to the telephone company, period, and that they were not obligated to let other companies use them. In other words, he was completely flouting the Telecommunications Act of 1996 as well as a century of Common Carrier law.
Because the law requires some competition to be permitted, Powell chose to emphasize "intermodal" competition. In other words, the cable company was The Competitor. And if you think two isn't enough, there was BPL, the Third Pipe.
Note that under his model, none of these had to allow ANY independent ISPs to have access to their wires. (Right now, telephone companies are required to, but not cable, BPL, or wireless providers. BellSouth and Verizon have explicitly Petitioned to be relieved of that obligation, and Powell himself had put a docket [02-33] on the table to that effect, though they never got a majority to act on it.) So you'd get your Fox News through three channels, and, ISPs being "information" providers, nobody would be obligated to allow you to access sites they didn't like. Think about what kind of BPL "information" service you're likely to get from an electric utility, given the current regime's close relationship with the energy industry.
Tinfoil hat time: BPL's interference with radio is a feature, not a bug. It is the super-duper shortwave jamming system that the Soviets dreamed of but never succeeded in building! Take a country like, say, Saudi Arabia. They could buy BPL and provide their filtered, Wahhabi-safe, royalist-safe "broadband" service to the public, and they would lose their ability to get shortwave radio broadcasts, which in some parts of the world are still an important source of information. The ham bands are notched; shortwave broadcast bands are not! So BPL is for export, to countries like China too. Whether the USA gets that censored remains to be seen. Shortwave listening here is extremely obscure, but it does theoretically provide another channel for hearing about the world.
Apparently nobody's explained to you the difference between a rural and an urban existance. You're obviously going to give up the conveniences of living in a city, but the trade off is that you don't live in a sardine-can apartment with noise/air pollution and excessive crime. Also, it's probably physically possible for you to exceed the speed limit due to a lack of bumper-to-bumper traffic.
But more to the point, BROADBAND OVER POWER LINES DOESN'T WORK. There. Read it once again if you didn't get it the first time. Let's pretend we don't care that it interferes with all forms of RF communication, because surfing pr0n at broadband speeds is obviously more important to you than, say, emergency response services. The more pressing issues are:
a) It's blocked by transformers. That means it won't go through substations or, more importantly, from the street to your house. See that cylinder on the phone pole out there? That's a transformer. Theoritically, you could put a WIFI from the pole to your house, but you just said you're in the NRQZ. (Which would seem to indicate that RF leakage from BPL would be a federal violation in the first place).
b) It receives interference. That's right. Antennas work both ways. What does that mean for you? Well, unfortunately it means that the broadband transmissions are highly prone to errors, and, in fact, an RF broadcast could disrupt your broadband completely if it's within 5 miles of the power line that carries your broadband.
So, what's a viable alternative? Write your representative and ask him to introduce legislation to subsidise fiber to rural locations, just like they did with electricity back in the day. Until then, maybe try satellite, or TCP via avian carrier. Alternatively, you could make a friend at UVA and use their broadband.
Good day, sir.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
BPL FAQ for those wanting a primer on the technology, the issues, and the locations where it's operating.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .