Digital Power Line Gets Buried

vyzar writes "NOR.WEB Ltd, the joint venture between UK telco Norweb Telecom and Nortel Networks developing Digital Power Line technology, for carrying high-speed data over electricity supply lines, is being disbanded, and the technology dumped. Norweb Telecoms say that the technology has been "proved", but the project was disbanded for financial reasons. The fact that the technology leaked high levels of radio frequency in frequecy bands used by the UK emergency services, military, and radio hams; and that it was fighting an uphill battle with the UK radio licensing authorities, did not appear to be mentioned in news reports. "

Comments

Nice try.

[WasterDave]

We're going to get sheets and sheets of "told you so" messages, some of which will carry the "powerlines as an antenna" analogy.

Fair enough, it all went shed shaped, but you have to give them credit for looking beyond the end of their noses. Consider for a second the following bits of conventional wisdom:

* In a few years we may have computers that can perform tens of thousands of calculations, per second !!! (excited and drooling scientists circa 1960).

* Nuclear power will be too cheap to meter (other excited and drooling scientists circa 1960).

* A free operating system will never be as good as a proprietary one (drooling Microsoft executives circa 1995).

* Many millions of computers, worldwide, will all be connected to the same network.

So we have some vast understatements, some over simplifications and one blatantly incorrect. But in amongst this company "we think we can get half a dozen Mbit/s down power lines" isn't that an outrageous a claim.

And the prize, had they made it work? Dead telcos. 80% of their business anyway. A nearly immeasurably large quantity of income for the next god-knows-how-long.

Nice try. Back to shining lasers from one rooftop to the next.

Dave :)

Unfiltered Blindness

[Effugas]

Supposedly--mind you, I'm a city boy, so WTF do I know--large chunks of the cross country power grid are just unshielded solid cable. Why pay to insulate over those kind of distances, when you can just shove the cables up pretty high and hope nothing like a large-winged eagle will short your cables...

"KFE: The Official Dinner of BFE."

The point is, sometimes when you design to the minimum specification, things get burnt. Most power grids were designed for tossing out 60hz AC at the endpoints. Higher frequency artifacts were just never considered in the design specs. So basically we're left with an infrastructure that truly *is* universally available(power company goes *almost everywhere*, because private power is still expensive--this'll change), but we can't use these wires all over the place because of a failure in foresight.

The most powerful example of not seeing where things were going involves Sprint--as far as I've heard, which, again, probably ought to be verified, is that when they laid their thousands of miles of cable they only put in a few strands apiece. All the money was spent doing the truck roll...and barely anything on expandability for the future.

There's a lesson here. We all seem to thing where things are going. I think technologists need to start quantifying the degree of unsurity in technological prediction, so that companies like Sprint and Nortel can evaluate their decision makings on much large timespans.

Well, at least that's what I think.

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com


Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.