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Texas to Get Broadband Over Power Lines
mrops writes "CNet is reporting that Texas will soon be getting broadband over power lines. From the article, "Broadband service over power lines (BPL) is not a new technology. People have been experimenting with building communication networks over power lines since the 1950s. But it hasn't caught on due to its low speed, low functionality and high development cost." Unfortunately this technology matured a bit too late and has been subdued by recent rush of wi-fi products. The technology has a lot of potential and wi-fi black zones are not an issue in simple home setups."
Wireless power has already come and gone... over a century ago!
I don't respond to AC's.
I thought the problem with IP on power lines is that power lines are really just large unshielded antennas. The IP traffic on them runs a frequencies that will jam Ham and other important radio traffic like air traffic control radio. Has Texas solved this problem or is it Damn The Ham!
The usage of BPL is inherently going to cause signal noise around the 30 MHz range, where quite a bit of ameteur radio is found. The BPL technology is routing signals over an UNSHIELDED wire, which unlike telephone cable, radiates the signal outwards. This means that the signal will be leaked into the airwaves and, if there is enough concentration of the signals, will disrupt or all togeather drown out any ameteur radio broadcasts.
BPL is bad for HAM. Shame on Texas!
(Tons of reference Links)
http://www.w4ovh.net/bplinfo.htm
(Other Links)
http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BPLandHamRadio/
Required reading for internet skeptics
What this all translates into is a company that can offer power at a reduced price to its consumer, because of the associated cost savings and secondary revenue stream.
Sorry man but this translates into higher prices for any type of wireless in the area because you wipe out everything with god-damn huge antennas. See relavant wikipedia article:
Some groups oppose the proliferation of this technology, mostly due to its potential to interfere with radio transmissions. As power lines are typically untwisted and unshielded, they are essentially large antennas, and will broadcast large amounts of radio energy (see the American Radio Relay League's article). Because of their lack of shielding, the BPL systems are also at risk of being interfered with by outside radio signals.
actually theres a couple of different power companies I can get my power from in Houston right now. If we allowed more deregulation, the incentive to lower the price would be too great to resist.
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
Tesla sold Hearst on backing his power transmition system by telling him it was a way for mass communications. The communications were secondary to Tesla who was more interested it providing free power. Hearst pulled backing and had the tower demolished when he found out what Tesla was really up to. It was much like radio. Tesla designed the equipment for remote control and considered communications a secondary issue.
Well, I've actually used broadband internet over powerlines between June 2002 and July 2005. Ping-times were horrible, the service was mediocre at best, and the modem was a PITA. But it was easy to set up(and easy to plug out and return to the ISP). Mostly it was the ISPs fault, because they underestimated the use, and overestimated their own capacity. Claimed a normal speed of 1Mbit/s, I usually got a 256kbit/s service. Used a modem by the Swiss company Ascom.
She: Hey, are you a traitor? Me: No, I'm atheist.
While interference is an issue, it is not the issue that has prevented us from doing this. I do not see anything that shows they have solved the fundamental issue. In the US, the power lines in your neighborhood are typically carrying 220 volts, which is more efficient than carrying 110, which is what your house eats. Those great big ugly transformers you see on every other pole are used to step the voltage down to 110 so your Xbox doesn't light on fire (note: the Xbox 360 has other means for accomplishing this) Unfortunately, the big transformer has a nasty side-effect: It acts as a low-pass filter on the power. This is a good thing if you want clean power. It is a bad thing if you are trying to carry a high-frequency wave of data on top of the 60-cycle hummer. The data is stripped off by the transformer. Since we developed the 'every other house' transformer model for the most part in the US, this means you might be able to talk to one of your neighbors. In Europe, they use a different model, a transformer for every block, so they have a less severe problem, but a problem none the less. This is why you can use your internal AC wiring for phones and stuff, but not get very far outside, I am not aware of how they have eliminated this problem.
A most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is if they foul up there's no law against wacking them around a bit.
Well, it's not the same thing as broadband, but I live in Texas (Austin, specifically), and the electric company has already been doing these things for several years. About three years ago, they came and replaced my meter with a digital one that can be read remotely. I don't know if it can shut off power remotely, but it certainly seems possible.
Also, they are a utility that sees its peak usage in the hot part of the day in the summer, and since peak usage largely determines how much generating capacity you have to build, they've instituted a program where they give customers a free smart thermostat. The thermostat communicates with the home office, and when demand is very high, the electric company can tell the thermostat to cycle off 1/3 of the time during the hottest part of the day. Supposedly, this only happens like 5 days a year, and only for a few hours, but it reduces their need to build power plants, so it's worth it for them to give out a free thermostat. Also, the thermostat is programmable, so you can set it to raise the temperature while you're at work and so on, which makes it a good deal for customers.
Furthermore, the LCRA (Lower Colorado River Authority) has a big fiberoptic loop that they use for communications. I believe they provide bandwidth to others, but the primary purpose of their network, as I understand it, is to allow them to control and maintain their equipment.
Oh, and while I'm on the subject, I happen to live almost right under high-tension power lines coming from Mansfield Dam, and they wreak havoc with everything wireless in my apartment. My wireless mouse is jumpy, people can't hear me on the cordless telephone, etc. I switched from a 900 MHz cordless phone to a 5.8 GHz cordless phone to try and escape the interference, but no improvement. I tried using a remote controlled toy that works in a friend's house, but even it won't work in my apartment. Come to think of it, I wonder if they aren't already running some kind of high-speed data transmissions over these power lines.
I work for a company that is rolling out BPL in Arizona. I'm not 100% involved with the project but I get to sit in on a lot of meetings. What follows is my general understanding of how it works.
Currently the power companies have no way of monitoring their grid except for watching for major drops in consumption. Basically, they don't know your power is out until someone from your neighborhood calls them and lets them know.
We install what is basically a low end PC at each transformer which is used to inject the signal for the area covered by that transformer. There are additional apps running on the PC that are constantly communicating back to the power company about the state of the transformer, load, etc. If the node reports a problem or if communication to the node is lost they know there's a problem and can send someone right out. Should result in much higher response times.
MG
I am assuming a local loop for the broadband that doesn't have to concern itself with the higher voltage stepdowns. I believe 220 is what comes out of the local substations. A broadband carrier could tap in at that point with backhaul and only have to deal with the 220-110 stepdown. The issue is physics, so until you see them up on the poles replacing the big ugly transformers with something sleek and digital-looking, I would not hold my breath for broadband over powerlines.
A most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is if they foul up there's no law against wacking them around a bit.
BPL is BROADBAND and appears throughout the HF spectrum, where there are LOTS of assigned users, some of whom are OTHER COUNTRIES MILITARIES, some of whom are our own, some of whom are international broadcasters, and some of whom are volunteers who provide emergency communications for just about any emergency that happens to take place, and almost all of which are covered by international treaty.
This kind of thing is called SCADA -- supervisory control and data acquisition, and it doesn't require BPL to accomplish. If the power companies are trying to claim it does, then look for the real agenda.
Mod parent DOWN as he only tells you HALF the truth. I, unlike most other /.ers went over to Wikipedia and READ the WHOLE article referenced. Here is what he DIDN'T tell you...
..so after reading that it seems the parent was crying FOUL over nothing. I have wireless Internet here in Rural N. Texas (in fact there are several options) and also have TXU power in the area. We've seen no problems.
New FCC rules require BPL systems to be capable of remotely notching out frequencies on which interference occurs, and of shutting down remotely if necessary to resolve the interference. BPL systems operating within FCC Part 15 emissions limits may still interfere with wireless radio communications and are required to resolve interference problems. A few early trials have been shut down, though whether it was in response to complaints is debatable.
Recently, Motorola has announced a new Low Voltage Access BPL system that has a reduced potential for interference over the Amperion Inc. and Current Technologies LLC systems. The American Radio Relay League was invited by Motorola to participate with these tests, and even installed the Motorola system at their headquarters. Preliminary results were very positive with regard to interference.
Unless TXU gets really fast and really cheap they aren't going to displace Cable & DSL except where those are not available, which seems to be a shrinking area. . TXU knows nothing about running an ISP, so hopefully they outsourced it to some firm that does.
I live in eastern PA (Lehigh Valley Area) and was on the local trial of BPL.
;-).
Our power company, PPL, built up a network about a year ago that promised BPL at 1.5mbps symmetric for everyone. I actually got in on the first trials of the service... and it simply sucked. Firstly and foremostly, the speeds NEVER got ANYWHERE near 1.5mbps... in either direction... at any time of day. About half of the system was based on 802.11x wireless, which is what got the signal from the medium voltage lines (the ones that feed the transformers that get the power down to 110v) to the homes. This was done because otherwise, they would need a device to jump over every transformer, since the signal for BPL doesn't survive otherwise. So, as I was wardriving, I noticed a VERY big bunch of PPLBroadbandxxxxxx APs in the area, which I suspect caused part of the problem: too much signal, not enough bandwidth.
Other things I noticed (but were logical design decisions made by the system builders, not inherent limitations in the technology) include:
- Throttling of ICMP, which totally screwed with any traceroute or ping measurement when troubleshooting
- Use of unroutable IP space for end customers
- Authentication of end users not by the BPL modem's MAC (like cable modems work), but by the MAC of the first device behind it... a real headache for those of use switching out devices on a regular basis
All in all, BPL is one of those things that sounds good on paper, but is absolutely abysmal in practice. If I were to put my money on a future last-mile broadband technology, it would have to be DSL (newer DSL variations allow much greater distances from CO to demarc) or long-range wireless (WiMAX, low orbit satellite, 4G cellular, etc).
Just for the record, about a month ago, PPL gave up, took down all of their equipment and went home. I suspect it's being used down in Texas about now
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It is the monkied monkey that monkies with another monkey's monkey. Monkey.
You may better understand that it doesn't take "hundreds of watts" to interfere when you consider that the interference need only be above the level of a more distant signal - which also has that inverse-square-law propogation. A miliwatt in the right place - where the reciever is - will take out a distant high-powered signal. Take a look at the amount of RF that recievers expect - it's really miniscule - fractions of microvolts.
I think the Cincinatti system is one that has been reported to have problems, yes. Check out the ARRL web site and search for old news.
Unfortunately, the FCC rules don't protect the hams, because they define the degree of protection necessary incorrectly by several orders of magnitude.
When the flooding happened in New Orleans, nearly 1000 well-trained hams showed up to supplement the efforts of the hams who already lived there. The government physically kept them out for a few days (who knows what they were thinking) but had eventually to let them in because they were essential to recovery efforts. You can't really have emergency communications on a "disaster" scale without hams. There isn't another corps of 600,000 trained volunteer communicators in our country to draw upon. And you can't have large-scale disaster communications without 1-30 MHz, as these are the only frequencies that go long distances without infrastructure between the communicating stations.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.