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Electric Companies Get Involved With Broadband
Billosaur writes "The Marketplace Morning Report on NPR has an interesting piece on how electric companies are getting into the high-speed Internet business with 'Broadband over Power Lines', or BPL." From the article: "By purchasing the right equipment power companies can quickly offer Internet service to millions of new customers. There are several pilot projects being launched in the US, including one in the Pittsburgh suburb of Monroeville. That service is being offered by Duquesne Broadband -- a spinout of the local power company.'"
Sure the technology to be able to do this well keeps improving... I'm kinda getting sick of hearing about this and fiber to the curb every few months when it is no closer to wide scale roll out than it was 10 years ago when I first started hearing such ideas.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have both, but please... quit trying to get my hopes up!
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Where I live (Burlington, VT) the city provides both electricity and fiber optic service. It's Interesting that it was more practical to run new fiber optics throughout the city than to use existing power lines, since the city already owns the electric department.
Bradley Holt
BPL advocates will tell you that it's not fttp. And it's not going to be at cable speeds for a long while, but has lots of possibilities.
But here are the salient positive points:
1) these guys are by their nature, net-neutral and while they're utilities, they don't live behind ancient telco models
2) reliability is a serious culture within the power community; these guys have trucks and know how to use them
3) the electrical utilities have the largest amount of unused communications easements and right-of-ways in the USA
4) the utilities in the EU are riding this wave quickly; they go everywhere, while the old tired fat ex-PTTs slumber
5) more competition keeps the telco and cable companies honest. We need alternatives.
So, I say: party on, BPL!
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
It's more than a bad idea, it's a forking NIGHTMARE. Even for non-hams like me, the radiated fields from the lines will cause all kinds of problems. BPL produces a horiffic amount of conducted line noise, in violation of the FCC's own regulations, and further pollute an already overcrowded section of bandwidth (DC to light). BPL may be good for the power companies' profit margins, but it's bad for EVERYONE.
And that's my professional opinion.
-dave
EE, currently working on EMC compliance
This is not a sig. this is a duck. quack.
BPL is one of those things which sounds good or at least interesting
at the start, but the deeper you go the less decent it gets.
The problem boils down to the fact that a BPL system emits RF (radio
frequency) energy, causing interference to entities that use those
frequencies. The FCC has been put into an interesting spot here, as
they realize that the problems generated by it are real, but are also
being pushed by the Bush administration to move forward on this.
Ham radio operators are definitely negatively affected by this. Hams
by their nature deal with "weak signals", which the noise generated
by BPL tends to clobber, making many of the "shortwave" (ie, below
30MHz) bands less than useful.
If you care to see a pretty good response to this go to www.arrl.org
and look for BPL.
This is a real horror for hams. Least anyone think that ham radio
is out of date in this era of advanced technology, talk with officials
down south who dealt with Katrina, or in Neq York City on September 11th.
BPL pits big money interests against litterally amateurs, with the latter
group figting back, and being at least partly successful, in getting
the FCC to deal/recognize interference complaints, and getting these
systems cleaner.
What will happen, I cannot say. But I look to systems in Europe
and Asia where broadband exists and doesn't use BPL, and see systems
which offer far better service.
--STeve Andre'
amateur callsign WB8WSF
I realize that a power company would be smart enough to be aware of this and likely provide filters to strip that out for folks who use the service, but how are they going to filter the crap out for those who don't have a data box at their house to strip the signal, and how much would it cost? More importantly, wil lthat cost be an enforced one?
Either way I really don't like the idea at all, even if I never use the thing.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
No, they're just steam-rollering ahead realizing that they have far, far more potential customers to reach than hobbyists (valuable hobbyists, but hobbyists nonetheless) to put out.
I'd personally like the FCC to put an axe in this idea, but it's never going to happen. Once they get enough of a userbase, it'll be impossible to shut them down politically. Ham radio will just die and the public simply won't know what they've lost because they don't use it themselves.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").