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BPL: The Internet's Fool's Gold

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hand-meet-other-hand dept.

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."

4 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. Thank Slashdot as well by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Was Slashdot any better with its breathless stories about "The Myth of Radio Spectrum Interference", "The Illusion of Spectrum Scarcity", and so on?

    1. Re:Thank Slashdot as well by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 5, Informative
      It should be pointed out that Ham radios (nor most any other affected device) are not the smart receivers David Reed has in mind.

      From Salon's article:

      The problem isn't with the radio waves. It's with the receivers: "Interference cannot be defined as a meaningful concept until a receiver tries to separate the signal. It's the processing that gets confused, and the confusion is highly specific to the particular detector," Reed says. Interference isn't a fact of nature. It's an artifact of particular technologies. This should be obvious to anyone who has upgraded a radio receiver and discovered that the interference has gone away: The signal hasn't changed, so it has to be the processing of the signal that's improved. The interference was in the eye of the beholder all along. Or, as Reed says, "Interference is what we call the information that a particular receiver is unable to separate."
  2. Re:Laugh Test by jd · · Score: 5, Informative
    What amazes me is that it made it to the trial stage in the US even after trials in other countries (such as the UK) had verified that the interference was not only present but unacceptable.


    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)
  3. Cincinnati BPL by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 5, Informative
    It's being tested in the Cincinnati area by Current Communications a division of Cinergy. Currently, about 8,000 homes wired up.

    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."