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FCC's Duplicity On BPL Revealed
eldavojohn writes "Ars has a summary of the curious events surrounding the death of broadband over power lines (BPL). We've discussed BPL's trials and advances here many times. The Federal Communications Commission's go-ahead was halted last year by a federal court, after a suit by the American Radio Relay League over claims of unacceptable radio interference from BPL. The DC Court of Appeals judge noted, 'There is little doubt that the [FCC] deliberately attempted to exclude from the record evidence adverse to its position.' The ARRL's FOIA request to obtain non-redacted documents finally bore fruit under the Obama administrations more open FOIA guidelines. The ARRL's preliminary analysis of the released documents point out a few critical areas where the FCC redacted data that is clearly adverse to the claims of BPL proponents. By rights, this ought to lay BPL to rest once and for all." A story at Broadband Reports notes that BPL is dying on its own, as most of the vendors who had been testing it "have since moved on to promote smart electrical grid functionality."
BPL isn't really (and never was) about delivering Internet service over electric lines. It was geared more towards smart power meters that the utilities could read remotely rather than sending an army of meter readers out to every house in the country once a month to read the meters.
You don't need much bandwidth to read out a few digits....
The 'B' in BPL stands for Broadband, which was definitly intended to be used to send consumers large amount of porn....
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Broadband may mean high bandwidth in most marketing contexts, but it also means sending multiple signals over a single line. I doubt that they're sending those digits modulated into the 60hz AC current so they're multiplexing the line in a broadband fashion. Broadband may still apply if each house has its own meter frequency that is sent over a single trunk line coming from the transformer up to the local power station regardless of the bandwidth used.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
You're years behind the times as that army is already virtually gone. They've long since been replaced by meters that can be read by simply driving down the street and interrogating them as they go by.