AT&T Begins Testing High-Speed Internet Over Power Lines (reuters.com)

AT&T has started trials to deliver high-speed internet over power lines. The company announced the news on Wednesday and said that trials have started in Georgia state and a non-U.S. location. Reuters reports: AT&T aims to eventually deliver speeds faster than the 1 gigabit per second consumers can currently get through fiber internet service using high-frequency airwaves that travel along power lines. While the Georgia trial is in a rural area, the service could potentially be deployed in suburbs and cities, the company said in a statement. AT&T said it had no timeline for commercial deployment and that it would look to expand trials as it develops the technology.

"We think this product is eventually one that could actually serve anywhere near a power line," said Marachel Knight, AT&T's senior vice president of wireless network architecture and design, in an interview. She added that AT&T chose an international trial location in part because the market opportunity extends beyond the United States.

Comments

Re:What frequency? WIll ATT be tertiary use of fre

[Areyoukiddingme]

If this is going to be on ham radio frequencies, hams are going to essentially be able to cite FCC regs and say "shut that shit off" due to interference. Hams are GOOD at triangulating interferance, and if they discover it's coming from *all around them* they're going to speak up *quick*.

I'd bet a pizza that AT&T has received assurances from Ajit Pai that the protests of hams will be ignored this time. Power line data has been tried before. It always makes a mess of the radio spectrum. Hams file the paperwork, and it goes away. Until the next time. This is the next time, but it might be a little different from the other times, since we have a blatantly corrupt chairman of the FCC doing what we all thought Tom Wheeler would do but didn't. I'm sure Mr. Wheeler was a great disappointment to his former employers.

Re:Ham radio.

[Ol Olsoc]

I didn't know that 'airwaves' could travel over powerlines. Maybe just the high frequency ones described in the summary? That's a hell of a breakthrough.

They have done a minimal version of this for years.

The problem is that this is another one of those ideas where people believe they can trump the laws of physics.

The last time this was attempted, It failed pretty miserably. There are some serious problems. A power line is an antenna of sorts. You put signals on it, and they are going to radiate outwards from it. And the different frequencies of all the digital data will create a rather broadband hash. It interferes with licensed services. Attempts were made to notch out the frequencies that it used to not have the interference, but intermodulation, the mixing of different frequencies kind of made the notches not do much. The square-like waves of digital signals just make a splattery mess.

Then there is getting it into the house. The concept uses the signals coming in on the house wiring But the signals don't survive goingthrough the transformer that feeds poer to your house. the cure such as it is, is some bypass circuitry that has the signal travelling down high tnesion lines. like a couple KiloVolt, then bypassing the transformer. to your house line. Hopefully the failure mode is always open.

And the real kicker is that just about any radio transmission can knock them out. Kids with hand-talkies, People with CB radios, amateur radio operators, airplaines passing overhead.

Coupled with the fact that it's a "Last Mile" solution, it needs an actual fiber or cable line to get the signal to the BPL lines, the main purpose of BPL is to extract investment money from people who do not understand RF.

It's always sold as a way to get Internet access to people who aren't in a populated area. That part is 100 percent bogus. What would be the point of a last mile solution? They have to run the real line alomst to the house way out in the country.