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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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The FCC picks winners and losers all the time. Ask the folks who had private mobile radio licenses when the FCC decided that the frequencies could be better utilized - by Nextel. Most of those licenses were for local emergency services, and we all know how well Nextel worked for them when the time came.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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?
PS, porn from the power company, that is both shocking and electrifying... I'm sure I'm going to catch some static from that, but I couldn't care watt happens to my current karma because of these charged puns.
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.
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.
*This* is why I don't want the government running businesses (mail, trains, hospitals, schools). The people in power use that power to censor information contrary to their personal beliefs, and they push agendas we are forced to adopt (like the "feel good" philosophy that is failing to teach our kids anything). It's a rigged system, a monopoly, not freedom or liberty.
But that's the problem. The goverment *isn't* running the show, private industry is.
Imagine what your country would be like if the RIAA were in charge of running the roads.
The real problem with broadband over powerline is you need alot of bandwidth, at the low frequencys that are called the AM band, and the shortwave band; which would not be so bad, if the cables they used for this were like the one the cable tv company used, but the powerlines are not shielded cables, anything that goes over them leaks energy all over the place, basicly overloading all the cheap electronics with rf recievers in them, yet unlike the cable tv companies, the power companies don't think you want to steal their signals... although I've read of many stealing power when the lines go right over their house or barns, which have huge transformers hidden in em
it's bugs us ham radio people the most, cause, the way to test if it was causing crazy ass static to overwhlem all the nice signals we used to get from foriegn countries, (which is how we make our free long distance phone calls, be it analog, or digital, wheather talking, typing, or sending pictures) was not to listen to the radio, no, instead it was the signal level at the closest powerlines and the fcc's version of how quick the signal is supposed to drop off.... hence this ugly argument, and the desire to hide the facts as to how it was decided.
While I agree that the FCC is riddled with rot, and I'm very much in favor of freedom as a goal, the notion that the free market is more honest seems dubious at best.
The trouble is, private entities are generally quite responsive to customer requirements. This is their virtue, in most cases; but it can also be a huge vice. Institutional Review Boards, for instance, are supposed to verify that clinical trials are being conducted with adequate safeguards for the welfare of research subjects. The companies that hire them, though, are attempting to buy IRB approval, which is what they want, not ethical oversight, which is what they need. Shockingly enough, "customer service" quickly goes from basic efficiency to telling the customer exactly what they want to hear. Arbitration agents tend to work the same way. Any large company that habitually includes mandatory binding arbitration clauses in its contracts(this almost definitely means your bank, your credit card company, often your telco, quite frequently your car dealership, among others) will be a repeat buyer of arbitration services, probably hundreds or thousands of cases a year. You, on the other hand, might be buying a few instances a lifetime. Wholly unsurprisingly, arbiters overwhelmingly find in favor of their real customers, and ones that don't typically find themselves without work.
Regulatory capture is a real, and very important, problem; but government corruption is only one of its forms and it crops up, more or less inescapably, anywhere you have a situation where somebody needs to be told something they don't want to hear in order to protect the rights and interests of others. More specifically, it usually crops up when one party has a small, but extremely concentrated, interest in something, and a much larger party has a larger; but highly diffuse countervailing interest in the same thing. It is a hard problem.
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...
I actually don't expect much resistance to the puns, but I'd think that sort of thing should be confined to your own ohm.
I am officially gone from