Posted on 10/16/2004 5:52:19 AM PDT by Lonely Bull
Washington, DC, Oct. 15 (UPI) -- U.S. regulators will let utility companies send high-speed Internet signals through electrical outlets to residential and business clients.
--SNIP--
The technology uses a special modem that plugs into electrical outlets and offers data at speeds of 1 to 3 megabits a second, comparable to broadband service over cable modems or conventional phone lines, though not as fast as the 5 megabits a second achievable through the residential fiber optic lines just now are being introduced by the Bell companies.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
bttt
I don't see how this is new. Broadband over power lines has been available and approved here in the Greater Cincinnati area for some time now, though the local utility company slow to roll out (CINERGY) and has not reached my area yet. The neat thing about the service is that one could move the modem to any outlet in the system and have broadband service. Eventually I see the utilities sharing through agreement that permit a user to go any other utility company that has a similar service.
This is great news! Now your ineffectual cable TV provider and your lackadaisical phone company will have some additional competition.
Look for this to get very interesting in rural areas where local electrical cooperatives might just decide to provide high speed internet service for little or no additional cost.
Broadband so cheap it can be metered. I can see the sky-high DSL and cable provider prices dropping over the long run to match that offered by utility companies.
Yeah, and I can see it happening soon. Apparently this is not a very expensive technology. And it will spread like wildfire in the rural areas where broadband is both difficult to obtain and expensive.
Say bye bye to HF, amateur, and shortwave radio reception, coming to a receiver near you.
This could be good news for our friends out in the countryside.
Apparently, it's been demonstrated that these signals interfere with HAM radios, emergency communications, etc. The article doesn't mention how or if the FCC reconciled this.
BPL has been tried in many Euro countries and turned out to be CPL (Crap over Power Lines). Rates slow down with more users, interference is horrible to radio spectrum users. After much of hype it was pulled out. How long will it take here to die? When you hear crap on your radio, complain to FCC. Today's car radios are terribly prone to out of band interference, just drive by the BC station and you will hear it everywhere on the dial.
This is terrible news! Now the radio dial will be polluted with noise from BPL installations. And, since BPL is a Part 15 device, it must accept any and all interference so when the shortwave skip comes in, BPL throughput plummets.
Rural America would be better served by 802.11 style point-to-point wireless networking.
>This is terrible news! Now the radio dial will be polluted with noise from BPL installations. And, since BPL is a Part 15 device, it must accept any and all interference so when the shortwave skip comes in, BPL throughput plummets.<
Bingo. And, won't this throw a real wrench into ham radio transmissions, Citizen's Band transmissions, etc.? Short wave radio is a very interesting source of overseas information. Will it still come in with the potential interference from BPL?
Yes, BPL has been shown to be very destructive to radio.
Short wave radio is a very interesting source of overseas information. Will it still come in with the potential interference from BPL?
Probably not effectively. Some stations will make it, others will be drowned in the beeps, buzzes, and squawks of BPL.
I hope you are right. I do not like the price I pay for DSL service.
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