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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."
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....
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
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?
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.
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...