Slashdot Mirror
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."
This is, IMHO, the precursor as to what Internet delivery methods will be like, say, 20 years into the future. I believe that there will be a media of transport - such as powerlines - which is extremely widespread, even to remote areas. Piggybacked on top of this high-speed transport system will be cheap routers using whatever the latest wireless technology (think WiMax, but bigger). Thus, everyone who needs to can use the Internet anywhere, anytime, etc., maybe even providing for TV and the like. Perhaps it will even become a free utility?
Although homeplug is known to notch all the ham bands fairly well, it's still disturbing to many other HF spectrum users, such as SW listeners. MV lines are simply not designed to carry RF. Another issue...packet sniffing anyone?
Their Canopy components would need to get a lot cheaper for this to be affordable for residential broadband. Subscribers modules retail for over $500 now. Typical broadband cable modem or DSL modem costs around $100.
They advertise 200mbps at the speed now, kind of how when cable internet was first emerging it was advertised at 45mbps (which it is capable of under good conditions assuming you don't have a cap). However, we all know there is going to be a cap of some kind. Plus, due to potential RF interference issues, I wouldn't be surprised if BPL gets shot down by the amateur radio crowd.
I'm a big fan of the idea of faster internet access available to everybody. Especially those who live in rural areas. Nonetheless, given the success of power line networking up to this point, I'd say it's best to leave communications and power seperate.
This will mess up important radio broadcasts for HAM's and emergency services.
Also don't believe it will be free, water isn't free anymore, and wharever speed it is theoretically capable of it will be capped mercillessly as they milk us peons for every last penny (dime).
ARRL says this "should reduce the probability of interference to radio amateurs down to a level where it is reasonable to address the remaining interference on a case-by-case basis" if it's done right, that in theory it's "better engineering."
Comes down to, we who are ARRL members get to try to police another technological marvel and wonder against the companies that build things a little cheaper and a little worse than they promise.
I'm pretty dubious. Engineers, they can do things better, usually, than they're allowed to. Lawyers and Board of Directors members and top management, I suspect, are already doing business as competently and honestly as they possibly can, given the limitations of their roles.
Which is Enron, WorldCom, and the like.
The corporation -- remember, it's treated as a "legal "person" in our legal system -- is a "person" who lacks the requisite intellectual honesty to deal in a trustworthy way with physics, electronics, or even simple honest math.
No conscience, no brain, just a very sophisticated jellyfish with very long tentacles.
On top of that, it has been shown that BPL is messed up by radio transmitters (to the point where its unusable), and because radio operators have rights to that part of the spectrum, and BPL bleeds over, that interference is not going anywhere.
First off, some of your canopy info pages have proven helpful to me in the past, thank you.
.pkg files are just ZIP files with all the firmware images and a manifest. Following the old instructions worked well the one time I tried it for the sake of curiosity.
I've run CNUT on Windows and Ubuntu (they only "support" Windows and RHEL.)
I just finished updating a few thousand units using CNUT on Ubuntu. 0 units bricked or requiring end user intervention to recover. Motorola has been very good about replacing the few units that have died on us.
You can still upgrade the units without CNUT, the CNUT
CNUT is just a Java front-end to a bunch of perl scripts that script the original update process. They even packaged up their perl bits in a tidy little module. You should be able to make CNUT run wherever Java and perl run.
I would not run any Canopy Firmware older than 6.1, and you should have a really good reason to not be running 7.0.7 or 7.2.9.
You should not have the management interface on a routed subnet. If you are that paranoid, turn on VLAN support and change the management VLAN. The management interface and daemons have a number of little quirks. None of them have caused any problems for us since we a) use private IP space for management and b) keep the management interface on a management VLAN.
The AES unit uses a more powerful FPGA which costs a bit more. Granted that is probably not enough to account for the price difference.
You can control some (SNMP) administrative access by subnet. It is
They provide a access control server that is a bit crude, but it has good API docs and does what we want it to, which is control access and limit bandwidth.
I'd like to see a RADIUS client as much as the next guy, but BAM works fine and has a well documented database schema and SOAP interface.
If you are truly paranoid, get the AES unit and use the reset plug to disable the management interface and turn it into a dumb bridge.
It is trivial to access a Canopy network if the network was thrown up in 15 minutes.
It can also be virtually impossible to access if the designer has implemented a VLAN and subnet segregated network, is using BAM, turns off AP Eval, etc.
In the end, I agree that their RF side is good and the code side could use some work. In practice, their code quirks are avoided anyway by using good practices elsewhere.
The Canopy radios are neat little software radios (the only difference between them is the size of the onboard antenna and software load.) I can't wait for someone to figure out how to reprogram them for some other purpose (802.11 or TV tuner or something.)