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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."

21 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. BPL over quantum wires? by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Has anyone calculated the interference of BPL over quantum wires?

  2. FCC favors business over public interest ?!? by javaxman · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Say it's not so! I'm shocked !
    Where is the administration looking out for the public interest that I've become so accustomed to?!?

    What's that you say? Someone from the White House told them to get broadband-over-power-lines through no matter what, even if it destroys HAM radio and other public-use frequencies through interference? Why on earth would anyone do that? There isn't any corruption or corporate favoritism in Washington, is there?!?

    What do you mean lawyers outnumber engineers at the FCC by a near-infinite margin!?! How could that be so?!?

  3. So help me out.... by cephyn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    what did the FCC have to gain by pushing a crap technology, one that violates their own rules and interferes with their sphere of influence?

    It wasnt clear to me in the article why the FCC was so high on the tech...

    --
    Moo.
    1. Re:So help me out.... by jd · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Using E-o-P for broadband use is certainly stupid and (I suspect) was largely motivated by greed. There are potential uses for it, though, which might be more rational.


      Ethernet-over-Power would actually make some sense for the power companies themselves, as they'd be able to have "intelligent" power routing within the grid itself, rather than relying on someone at the power stations to hit the right buttons.


      Typically, blackouts such as the one that struck the northeast US and Canada a while back are caused by a combination of mechanical relays using outdated settings, grossly inadequate and inappropriate responses by the power stations, and devastatingly little information getting to those who need it.


      If you had each node in the grid able to communicate with neighboring nodes to determine how to supply the power without burning anything out - really, just a load-measuring routing protocol - you should be able to keep the grid running under just about any conditions imaginable.


      This kind of setup would be OK, because the bandwidth needed would be relatively low, so interference would be negligable. ALL you are carrying is routing information, changing in the order of seconds or longer, so a bandwidth of a few hundred bytes per second would be perfectly sufficient.

      --
      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)
    2. Re:So help me out.... by daVinci1980 · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Typically, blackouts such as the one that struck the northeast US and Canada a while back are caused by a combination of mechanical relays using outdated settings, grossly inadequate and inappropriate responses by the power stations, and devastatingly little information getting to those who need it.


      Offtopic to be sure, but the cause of the blackout in the northeast was actually a problem that shows up in lots of redundant systems (as shown in this simple basic program):

      10 One grid failed
      20 Another grid tried to take on the additional load caused by the failure of the previous grid
      30 The demands were too great for the additional grid to take on
      40 Additional grid fails
      50 GOTO 20

      Care has to be taken in redundant systems to ensure that a catastrophic failure in one place does not lead to a cascading failure throughout the entire network.

      In this case, it would've been better for the network to realize that a cascade was in progress and it was therefore better to drop power to the offending power stations rather than continue to ask others for help. Had the system passed this information along with the help request, (in programming a simple decrementing counter is sufficient) the power grid could've quickly realized that a cascade was in progress and could've cut its losses.
      --
      I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
  4. Ads by Google: Eritrean singles? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I have no idea why two of the three "ads by Google" were for meeting/dating Eritrean. Somebody is buying some weird keywords.

  5. Laugh Test by Detritus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've never understood how BPL even made it to the trial stage. Any EE with two brain cells is going to recognize that putting broadband HF/VHF carriers on unshielded power lines is a recipe for interference to many licensed radio services. See that wire going down the road? It's a fscking antenna, you moron!

    --
    Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
    1. Re:Laugh Test by tzanger · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I've never understood how BPL even made it to the trial stage. Any EE with two brain cells is going to recognize that putting broadband HF/VHF carriers on unshielded power lines is a recipe for interference to many licensed radio services. See that wire going down the road? It's a fscking antenna, you moron!

      What a brilliant navel-gazing point of view.

      I personally wouldn't mind seeing the signal combined with a decent spreading code to minimize the peaks in the spectral pattern (at the cost of raising the general noise floor, yes) or even figuring a way to couple the three phases together such that at a distance the radiated power would be next to nil, in much the same way that thousands of Amps of current flow through the lines but there's hardly any net magnetic flux when you're even a dozen feet away from the lines.

      Technical problems are there to be overcome. Simply throwing your hands in the air saying "of course there are going to be problems, what a moron" is a combination of elitism and a defeatist attitude the likes of which I've never seen before. Do you give up on everything because someone said it was going to be hard?

    2. Re:Laugh Test by foorilious · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Putting a signal on an antenna will obviously result in radiation, yes. What's not obvious though, is how much, and how quickly it falls off with distance. It's not clear to me if the entire line radiates and therefore it drops off as 1/R, or if (as some claim), it will instead fall off with 1/R^2 or 1/R^4. Add to the fact that they're notching the public frequencies, and I don't think we can necessarily trust the article's author at his (clearly biased) word that "there will be interference."

      I don't know enough about this to say if anyone is right or wrong, but I do suggest reading the author's disclosure at the end of his article, and considering that the ARRL has an established position on this issue, and one that may be more emotional than rational, in the final analysis. It's also not clear from my quick read of the article if interference has been demonstrated from BPL lines complying with the new FCC rules for BPL

    3. Re:Laugh Test by WolfWithoutAClause · · Score: 4, Interesting
      In the UK though, we bury our power cables, so the cables aren't nearly as leaky.

      However, even in the UK, there's a problem- the street lights are run off the mains too. So you have a whole row of transmitters all neatly lined up. Gah. Presumably it's possible to put a filter on each and every one at ground level, but it's fairly expensive I guess.

      I talked to some of the guys that worked for Nortel on it, they were very enthusiastic, and seemed to think it would work.

      One problem they got around was the streetlights again. At UK lighting up time, all the streetlights turn on, something like: blink, blinkety-blink, blink blink blink, on. Now each blink throws a whole mess of noise on the mains. And you have a whole street full of them. Essentially, the internet connection would go down for a minute or two everyday at lighting up time :-)

      I think they changed their filtering or shortened the packet size or something, and the problem mostly went away... But it was funny.

      Still, I don't see powerline internet really taking off, never did.

      --

      -WolfWithoutAClause

      "Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"
    4. Re:Laugh Test by John+Miles · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The only valuable asset that power companies own with respect to broadband Internet service are rights-of-way, not transmission lines. If they had spent half the money running fiber between their existing towers and poles that they've spent pushing the technical idiocy that is BPL, they'd have... well, OK, they'd still need to spend a lot more money.

      It is expensive to provide high-quality, robust Internet service. The physical transmission medium is about the least important/interesting part of it. Wiping out big chunks of HF spectrum with limited-speed BPL infrastructure is just plain dumb by any rational measure, with or without bellyaching and interference from ham operators. (What? Ten years have gone by, and now the power companies need to offer more than a megabit or so of bandwidth to compete with the telcos and cable operators? Gee, I guess you should have run fiber when you had the chance, huh?)

      BPL is one of the dumber ideas from the Powell regime, and I frankly wouldn't expect it to survive much additional scrutiny.

      --
      Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
  6. Re:BPL? by NoMoreNicksLeft · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Maybe we should just put in our own fiber.

  7. Re:What if... by Biogenesis · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It may be suprising, but in Sydney all the new power lines installed (i.e. ones that replace the ones that get torn down by trees in storms) are being replaced by a twisted quad cable. It's just the 4 conductors (3 phases + neutral) twisted together into one chunky black insulated cable. I'm wondering if the twists are close enough to stop RF from leaking out of them...

    --
    ...just so Google finds it.
  8. As far as "last mile" technology goes... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm going to go with geosynch satts, and those funky troposphere blimps.

    The satts need dialup, right now. Someone fucking work on that. If your option is no-fucking-intarweb-at-all, 800ms pings don't look all that bad. Especially when you can pull 100k/s downloads, and even 10k/s uploads. Beggars can't be choosers.

    The blimps look pretty decent. I'd like to couple that with a small (18" diameter) enclosed antenna. Probably not optical, because it's more prone to atmospheric disturbance (rain). I'm thinking 20ghz, or something really funky like 100ghz. Something that really cuts through the chop.

    I'm no electrical engineer, but if it was my call to make, that's the shit I'd have them working on...

    1. Re:As far as "last mile" technology goes... by FlameSnyper · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Except that 800ms pings is unacceptable for gaming, and 100kbps happens so rarely it might as well not... oh yeah, I'm on teh satellite interNot.

      Also, take a look at their handy Fair Access Policy -- don't let yourself get FAP'd... or your connection slows down to about 2kbps: http://fairaccess.direcway.com/

      A better explanation of the FAP: http://www.copperhead.cc/fap.html -- don't try downloading any Linux CDs!

      All this can be yours for only $100/month _with_ a 15 month contract!!

      Call me stupid^H^H^H^H^H^Hdesperate.

      Maybe by the time my contract is up in Sept, something decent will be in my area.

  9. Re:BPL? by J.+Random+Luser · · Score: 2, Interesting

    why arent the power companies themselves pushing...

    In this part of the world they are. Many have installed their own fiber on the power poles, for control & metering, and are selling the spare bandwidth. One thought they could do "fiber to transformer" then BPL. They soon found the error of their choice and now are struggling to fit demand into their backup wireless spectrum.

    As for BoG, one mainly electricity utility here inherited some abandoned gas pipes thru the city. They've pulled a lot of fiber thru those...

  10. Re:Thank Slashdot as well by tarball · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As an electrical engineer who majored in microprocessor based design and minored in RF design, I would say -

    1) Reed's ideas aren't even decent vaporware yet.
    2) Reed's ideas are going to have problems with the fact that antennas aren't broadbanded enough. And when they are, they are directional (often the wrong ones), and still not very broadbanded. And don't think fractal antennas will work, because they don't work well at all.
    3) Most important - his ideas have nothing to do with the HF section of the spectrum.

    tom
    K0TAR

    --
    I hate sigs, and refuse to have one.
  11. Re:or, you could read TFA. by Jaysyn · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Fuck it. Let em do it. I hope it becomes law. Let the chaos & finger-pointing ensue.

    Yes I'm serious.

    Jaysyn

    --
    There is a war going on for your mind.
  12. What if BPL is the ONLY choice? Insensitive clods! by Bloody+Peasant · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... other than a 56k modem?

    I challenge those who've been ranting about the technology to stop for a minute, put yourself in my shoes, and see how you like it. Or how you don't.

    I live in a somewhat rural area in central Virginia near Charlottesville. I'm way, way beyond the 15,000 cable foot requirement for DSL so that's out. There is no cable TV within 5 miles or more. And the only company offering wide area Wifi is a no go; I tried but couldn't get any signal because there are hills all around (10 million tons of granite equates to many hundreds of db in attenuation). (I'm also technically within the National Radio Quiet Zone [google it if you never heard of it] which makes additional wide-area wifi towers problematic).

    My electric provider (a rural co-op) has a trial of BPL going right now and they're promising to roll it out to more customers soon. Initial testing on the trial has apparently been good, though I don't know how much attention has been paid to local hams and the impact on them.

    If you're gonna diss my only broadband option, at least gimme some home for an alternative (other than moving)!!!

    --
    -- This .sig intentionally left meaningless.
  13. Re:Cincinnati BPL by connorbd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It could be the 21st century equivalent of Rural Electrification -- that's the Federal New Deal program that worked that nobody ever talks about.

  14. Re:Fatally flawed? by thurlow · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As an aside that may be of interest, we tried recently to use the Homeplug standard powerline system for some extra temporary PC's on an office LAN.

    The concept is great, you connect an adapter to a port on your LAN switch and to your powerline via a normal plug, and then connect each PC to either a network card adpater to powerline, or a USB adapter to powerline. Instant network expansion with no extra wires.

    It worked reasonably well, although a bit slow most of the time.

    This was until a large construction project started next to our office building. From then on the only time that the PC's connected to our office LAN would have any access, was during the lunch-time shutdown of the equipment on the construction site and in the evenings when the work stopped.

    We didnt use the system for very long after the connection was discovered.

    It was quite a disappointment overall.