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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."
It's still working in Manassas, Virginia. If you want full duplex 32 kbps for $24.95/month that is.
The contractor, Comtec, that ran the program has pulled out and it is now managed directly through the city's utilities department.
Broadband means sending multiple signals over different frequencies on one line, as opposed to baseband which is one signal on one frequency. It actually has no technical meaning that involves necessarily high bandwidth.
In contrast to BPL, powerline ethernet is doing quite well and has some nice products (I'd suggest it to anyone over wireless in a home any day - much faster and better range).
Unfortunately it causes the same sort of interference as BPL. One of my neighbours has just recently had his powerline ethernet kit taken away because it was causing interference from broadcast AM at 500kHz or so right up to about 150MHz. Two doors down it was enough to completely disrupt the 2m amateur band, and a couple of hundred metres away it was enough to disrupt the VHF lowband railway signalling system...
>>>The goverment *isn't* running the show, private industry is.
I cannot make any sense of your sentence, unless I conclude you have your head buried in the sand. Government runs the local mail business, they run the K-12 schools, and they run passenger rail, and in every case it's a monopoly with all the negative facets thereof (lack of choice, poor service, mistreatment of customers).
Perhaps you were thinking of healthcare, which you are correct is still private, but that's still better than a government monopoly. Imagine if your healthcare was run like Amtrak or the DMV. What a nightmare that would be. At least with private care, you have literally thousands of different hospitals to choose from. If hospital A sucks, choose hospital B instead. It's not a monopoly.
It's pro-choice.
Final thought - The economic housing bubble, and its eventual collapse, was caused by Congress's mandate for zero-down mortgages, and the Federal Reserve's poor economic policies (specifically Greenspan's artificially low lending rates). Yet another failure we can chalk up to government. Yay. And now they are pursuing policies that will create yet another artificial bubble which will build-up during 2010 and 2011, and eventually collapse.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall