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Motorola to Marry BPL and Wireless
prostoalex writes "Motorola is combining Intellon broadband-over-powerline chips with its own Canopy wireless systems to create an end-to-end broadband delivery system, where last mile delivery would be covered by wireless and broadband pipe would belong to electric utility. HomePlug AV standard will offer 200 Mbps downstream speed."
Ok, by bitching about BPL interference aside, it's still going to be a big collision domain. (think ethernet hub) If you have users of any density, you'd still have to segment up the powerlines and feed each segement with fiber separately. This just isn't economically viable in dense areas. Powerlines are _not_ the future of information transport.
Even though I don't like the idea of BPL, ARRL already said that Motorola's technology for BPL was 10 times better then the competitors. They say you can't even tell of any interference.
www.kb3juv.com
You can get them for $280 each in lots of 25 which could put the price in the range for an ISP to offer at cost with a one year contract lock in (making their profit on the ISP service). And as with all electronics, the price will only get cheaper as the technology advances and as the production volume goes up if and when this becomes a popular consumer technology.
Ignorant and arrogant, just what I have come to expect from people who irrationally hate amateur radio for no real reason and are uninformed enough to understand the first thing about BPL other than what marketing drones have told them.
(1) The Amercian Radio Relay League (primary amateur radio group) supports this. http://www.arrl.org/news/features/2005/08/01/1/
(2) There has been SIGNIFICANT proof in almost every BPL trial that it corrupts the HF space. Thus the complaints registered to the FCC by the military, air traffic people, civil air patrol, coast guard, and amateur radio operators. The ham guys just happen to be the loudest on the net, the others carry much more weight and they don't like it either. Many BPL trials have failed for this reason.
we think that BPL is more important than HAM radio.
Yes, ignorant people who are mislead into thinking that BPL will somehow provide inexpensive broadband (it will not, it has proven to be more expensive than cable and dsl) to rural areas (again, harder to do than cable and dsl). Suprisingly, these people are not interested in technical arguments about frequencies and RF radiation becasue they don't understand the concepts.
So to recap, (1) Motorola's BPL technology mostly solves the technical problems that just about ALL HF spectrum operators have complained about, and has the support of amateur radio, and (2) it is still broadband "fools gold", but there are plenty of fools out there.
Finkployd
OK, just to clear up a few points about this technology:
Canopy is a 'fixed wireless' sort of thing, so you would have an access point somewhere that could serve up to a few hundred or so subscriber modules. The subscriber modules would go on power poles, behind the transformers (ie, between the transformer and the end users). It would then be BPL from there into up to, if I recall, 8 homes or so. So, it lets you deploy Canopy to an area, but reduce your costs as you can feed more than one home with a single Canopy module.
As such, except for use of the 900mhz or 5.4Ghz spectrum, this would not be putting out enough power to interfere with ham radios or anything else. A good solution if you ask me. And you don't have to worry much about the 'cable modem' kind of hub bog downs, as it is just you and a few other people on the same backhaul link to the access point.
I do work for Motorola from time to time, and have seen this in person, and it is a quite nice solution.
I evaluated the Canopy system about a year ago for a project at work. Motorola is a great RF company but they don't know IP networking very well. Some of the things I noticed were:
-administration via telnet & http, no ssh or https
-no way to filter administrative connections based on source IP address
-administrative access is based on a locally defined username & password on each access point and subscriber module. they can't authenticate admin sessions from a radius or tacacs server
-the encryption suite is proprietary. while they do use AES as the encryption algorithm, the overall protocol is not based on IPSec, WPA, WEP, or any other standard
-subscriber modules use a manufacturers default encryption key to authenticate to the access point. a key management server must be implemented use a different key.
I don't know if any of that has been fixed in the past year or not. I have no clue how they got this device FIPS 140-2 certified. Unsurprisingly the security through obscurity worshipping government agencies I deal with are completely ga-ga over the Canopy. They are in love with the idea that the Canopy runs on a non 802.11 a/b/g frequency (because obviously no bad hackers will ever find it).
Funny, the ISP where I work sells them for $300 each, no contract. We sell them so fast that we are always running out of stock.
The $300 is high enough that people feel committed to the service (we don't need contract lock-in to keep customers) and is low enough that most of our customers can afford it. They can always take their SM to one of our competitors if they don't like our service.