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Digital Power Line Gets Buried

Posted by Hemos on from the bye-bye-british-fly dept.

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. "

1 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Unfiltered Blindness by Effugas · · Score: 4

    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.