Placing restrictions on a licensed service (Amateur) to protect an unlicensed service (BPL) would be contrary to everything in Part 15 and may even be in violation of the FCC charter. Who is the congressional oversight for the FCC anyway?
Another note on immunity. The BPL receiver is a spread spectrum receiver, and thus a broadband one at that. A high level RF signal on the "antenna" will simply saturate the receiver front end. Nothing will get through and it won't be able to heal it unless it can attenuate the signal with a preselector of some kind.
Prior to 1929 all radio communication was unlicensed and all was chaos. The problem back then was that only the strongest signal got through. Fast foward to 2003. The physics haven't changed. In a totally unlicensed world it would again be chaos and only the strongest signal would get through. Licensing brings order to the chaos just as it does to the highways. For some reason the FCC itself has forgotten this.
As for the internet "far exceeds anything ever before known to man". I was at UCLA in 1969 when the internet was born. It is an infrastructure intensive animal, albiet decentralized. It depends totally on infrastructure. Even your cell phone that you can talk around the world on would barely reach the next block without $$billions
in infrastructure. The tiny sliver of frequencies between 2 and 80 MHZ are the ONLY ones that allow world wide, low power, communication without any infrastructure whatsoever. To polute them would be analogous to using the geysers of Yellowstone to heat New York.
BPL should never be approved for three, sinple reasons;
1. Injecting high frequency RF onto the power lines at levels higher than the limits specified in 1989 WILL cause interference across the entire HF bands (actualy lower levels will do that). This is illegal according to FCC Part 15. Any device doing this can and will be shut down.
2. An entirely legal amateur transmitter, say a beacon transmitting 100 watts at 28.2MHz, in a common suburban backyard will render the local BPL system useless; and according to Part 15 the BPL system MUST accept this situation.
3. It is entirely unnecessary for the utilities to use the 2 to 80 MHz band for this purpose. The FCC has set aside 435MHz at 5GHZ for the Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure. This is more than 5 TIMES the bandwidth BPL could ever hope to use in HF. Systems using U-NII can be deployed TODAY (google Motorola Canopy); are already being used for broadband internet access in several communities and require no further action from the FCC. All the utilities have to do is hang U-NII nodes on the power poles at 2 to 10 mile intervals, depending on local geography.
All that remains is to convince the powers that be of the obvious.
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Placing restrictions on a licensed service (Amateur) to protect an unlicensed service (BPL) would be contrary to everything in Part 15 and may even be in violation of the FCC charter. Who is the congressional oversight for the FCC anyway?
Another note on immunity. The BPL receiver is a spread spectrum receiver, and thus a broadband one at that. A high level RF signal on the "antenna" will simply saturate the receiver front end. Nothing will get through and it won't be able to heal it unless it can attenuate the signal with a preselector of some kind.
Prior to 1929 all radio communication was unlicensed and all was chaos. The problem back then was that only the strongest signal got through. Fast foward to 2003. The physics haven't changed. In a totally unlicensed world it would again be chaos and only the strongest signal would get through. Licensing brings order to the chaos just as it does to the highways. For some reason the FCC itself has forgotten this. As for the internet "far exceeds anything ever before known to man". I was at UCLA in 1969 when the internet was born. It is an infrastructure intensive animal, albiet decentralized. It depends totally on infrastructure. Even your cell phone that you can talk around the world on would barely reach the next block without $$billions in infrastructure. The tiny sliver of frequencies between 2 and 80 MHZ are the ONLY ones that allow world wide, low power, communication without any infrastructure whatsoever. To polute them would be analogous to using the geysers of Yellowstone to heat New York.
BPL should never be approved for three, sinple reasons; 1. Injecting high frequency RF onto the power lines at levels higher than the limits specified in 1989 WILL cause interference across the entire HF bands (actualy lower levels will do that). This is illegal according to FCC Part 15. Any device doing this can and will be shut down. 2. An entirely legal amateur transmitter, say a beacon transmitting 100 watts at 28.2MHz, in a common suburban backyard will render the local BPL system useless; and according to Part 15 the BPL system MUST accept this situation. 3. It is entirely unnecessary for the utilities to use the 2 to 80 MHz band for this purpose. The FCC has set aside 435MHz at 5GHZ for the Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure. This is more than 5 TIMES the bandwidth BPL could ever hope to use in HF. Systems using U-NII can be deployed TODAY (google Motorola Canopy); are already being used for broadband internet access in several communities and require no further action from the FCC. All the utilities have to do is hang U-NII nodes on the power poles at 2 to 10 mile intervals, depending on local geography. All that remains is to convince the powers that be of the obvious.