Bucks county went to a 500 Mhz, all digital system, based on a Motorola Astro platform five years ago. The frequencies you cited are obsolete. NO emergency services company in Bucks County is operating on low-band/analog anymore.
The old analog channels, which are used for dispatch and to allow the use of analog scanners are being phased out next year in favor of a 154 Mhz dispatch channel, which is well up and above the BPL hash.
I'm a ham radio operator and I can assure you that we've got far more specturm than we need or use, and this BPL stuff has great potential for rural areas where even wimax isn't going to be a viable option.
BPL is a really the only solution for some areas, even in this day of DSL/Cable/Wimax/3G and whatever.
To give you folks a bit of perspective, I live 1.5 hours away from New York and Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, a place called Bucks County, up in the north end. It's not exactly "rural" but it's still a place where people come to get out to "the country".
DSL service has only been offered in this area since April 2004. Cable internet access is still NOT an option and won't be anytime soon. Modem connections in many areas are - at best - 56K X2, with typical connections much slower. ISDN is charged by the minute - at.04 cents per minute for a 128K line. T1 lines are $800-$1,200 a month - if you can get them.
There's a guy running an point-to-point wireless ISP operation called "Airisen" here, but it does not work where there's too many trees (like my house). Satellite via Directway or Starband is expensive (over $100 a month), relatively slow and has high latency. There are plenty of parts of the county where there's no cell service at all, and where there is, it's not very reliable.
What matters most about BPL is that it rides on existing infrastructure - no new towers, no new wires, no digging, no aiming, no clearing trees to get line of sight. The hoo-hah that goes into getting a cell tower put up around here is amazing, I can't imagine a Wimax system providing anything like the coverage offered by BPL, even if they could use existing towers and so forth. So BPL makes sense.
To the point of Ham Radio interference. Yes, BPL is going to pretty much wipe out high-frequency (HF) communications where BPL is deployed. However, in addtion to being a ham radio operator, I'm also a firefighter, and I work in various emergency situations all the time, and the fact is that ham radio now plays an almost insignifigant role in emergency communications, despite ARRL claims to the contrary. Sure, in some places, jobs such as storm spotting is handy, but that's a local communication need - not HF, which is a long-distance communications tool. In fact, local communications are really where ham radio is most handy, not the long distance stuff, which tends to go satellite more often than not.
Ham radio is a hobby with some possible uses in emergencies, however, it is as relevant to modern emergency services as a muzzle-loading rifle is to current-day military operations. Sure, there's a lot of history, but the world keeps turning, and the day comes where you have to abandon old technologies for the advantages of newer ones. Clinging to HF in a day of FRS, GMRS, WiMax, 3G and 802.11g is silly.
The cellular phone network has been tweaked to the point where emergency services workers can rely on it in emergencies, deployment of portable cell sites is common, sattelite phones are commonplace at major emergency scenes. Civillians have FRS, GMRS, Cell, Internet and land-line communications options, and with BPL, there will be yet another way to communicate that's offered to people who don't have the time, inclination or money to learn morse code and spend $20,000 (or more) on radio and antenna equipment.
I like my hobby - it's fun to play with radios and all that, but I'd never expect my hobby to interfere with the timely deployment of utility-grade broadband service to people who don't have it. Broadband global communications is literally a society-changing, mind-expanding, paridigm changing technology. Ham radio is a hobby enjoyed by a decreasing number of aging people. I would not expect a bunch of Civil War re-enactors to be driving military policy any more than I'd expect a bunch of radio hobbyists to be driving spectrum use policy.
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Bucks county went to a 500 Mhz, all digital system, based on a Motorola Astro platform five years ago.
The frequencies you cited are obsolete. NO emergency services company in Bucks County is operating on low-band/analog anymore.
The old analog channels, which are used for dispatch and to allow the use of analog scanners are being phased out next year in favor of a 154 Mhz dispatch channel, which is well up and above the BPL hash.
I'm a ham radio operator and I can assure you that we've got far more specturm than we need or use, and this BPL stuff has great potential for rural areas where even wimax isn't going to be a viable option.
.04 cents per minute for a 128K line. T1 lines are $800-$1,200 a month - if you can get them.
BPL is a really the only solution for some areas, even in this day of DSL/Cable/Wimax/3G and whatever.
To give you folks a bit of perspective, I live 1.5 hours away from New York and Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, a place called Bucks County, up in the north end. It's not exactly "rural" but it's still a place where people come to get out to "the country".
DSL service has only been offered in this area since April 2004. Cable internet access is still NOT an option and won't be anytime soon. Modem connections in many areas are - at best - 56K X2, with typical connections much slower. ISDN is charged by the minute - at
There's a guy running an point-to-point wireless ISP operation called "Airisen" here, but it does not work where there's too many trees (like my house). Satellite via Directway or Starband is expensive (over $100 a month), relatively slow and has high latency. There are plenty of parts of the county where there's no cell service at all, and where there is, it's not very reliable.
What matters most about BPL is that it rides on existing infrastructure - no new towers, no new wires, no digging, no aiming, no clearing trees to get line of sight. The hoo-hah that goes into getting a cell tower put up around here is amazing, I can't imagine a Wimax system providing anything like the coverage offered by BPL, even if they could use existing towers and so forth. So BPL makes sense.
To the point of Ham Radio interference. Yes, BPL is going to pretty much wipe out high-frequency (HF) communications where BPL is deployed. However, in addtion to being a ham radio operator, I'm also a firefighter, and I work in various emergency situations all the time, and the fact is that ham radio now plays an almost insignifigant role in emergency communications, despite ARRL claims to the contrary. Sure, in some places, jobs such as storm spotting is handy, but that's a local communication need - not HF, which is a long-distance communications tool. In fact, local communications are really where ham radio is most handy, not the long distance stuff, which tends to go satellite more often than not.
Ham radio is a hobby with some possible uses in emergencies, however, it is as relevant to modern emergency services as a muzzle-loading rifle is to current-day military operations. Sure, there's a lot of history, but the world keeps turning, and the day comes where you have to abandon old technologies for the advantages of newer ones. Clinging to HF in a day of FRS, GMRS, WiMax, 3G and 802.11g is silly.
The cellular phone network has been tweaked to the point where emergency services workers can rely on it in emergencies, deployment of portable cell sites is common, sattelite phones are commonplace at major emergency scenes. Civillians have FRS, GMRS, Cell, Internet and land-line communications options, and with BPL, there will be yet another way to communicate that's offered to people who don't have the time, inclination or money to learn morse code and spend $20,000 (or more) on radio and antenna equipment.
I like my hobby - it's fun to play with radios and all that, but I'd never expect my hobby to interfere with the timely deployment of utility-grade broadband service to people who don't have it. Broadband global communications is literally a society-changing, mind-expanding, paridigm changing technology. Ham radio is a hobby enjoyed by a decreasing number of aging people. I would not expect a bunch of Civil War re-enactors to be driving military policy any more than I'd expect a bunch of radio hobbyists to be driving spectrum use policy.