Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
The power line wasn't a giant freaking unshielded antenna! This tehcnology has been effecting communications gear all over the place. Its a very very bad idea in its current form.
http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/
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.
Most power companies are required to buy extra electriciy if you generate more power for the grid than you consume. This usually only applies to folks with solar panels and other sources of power that end up contributing to the grid. They get to watch their power meters run backwards!
I wonder if the same principle could be applied to net data flows! I would love to be paid by the power company for massive file sharing since I would be contributing more to the 'net than I consume.
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
in the latest QST http://www.arrl.org/qst/ about the FCC ignoring amateur radio ongoing complaints about BPL system interference.k .pdf
new BPL complaint here: http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2006/05/05/100/
system operator response here:
http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/files/COMTe
"What is coax but insulated copper conductor. With Edison's DC delivery methods, tried and proven over a hundred years ago, a single conductor with ground return has always been feasible. Now we will free you from the greedy power companies and their unfair monopolies one and for all. Bwahahaha!"
The combined telcos have scheduled a news-conference for later this afternoon.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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
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").
I would suggest you look at Corinex in particular, at 200megabit it doesn't cause any major interference. For that matter, here in Peoria we have a broad scale deployment of BOPL and considering my coworker is a ham enthusiast in the same town I find it odd that this fud is still being spread around. He's got no issues within a mile of the thing nor has the telecom company doing all the work had any issues reported to them. They are one of our sponsors so we generally talk to the people who would know. It makes sense that rf over the power lines would get amplified greatly but in practice it doesn't happen especially when you do it right at each substation. Our ISP runs fiber to each substation and then attached more or less a gateway that connects the fiber to the power lines.