Power companies enter broadband market (very interesting)

Cnet.com via The New York times on the Web ^ | October 16, 2005 | Ken Belson

[rawhide]

CINCINNATI--The idea has been around for years. In Spain and elsewhere in Europe, utility companies have long offered high-speed Internet service to consumers over their power lines.

But American utilities are only now beginning to roll out broadband connections on their grid.

For Jim Hofstetter, a salesman for Cadbury Schweppes, the food and beverage company, this new option was far better than the high-speed connection he used for years from his local cable provider.

"I would never go back now that I have this," said Hofstetter, who often works from his home office in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Cincinnati. He pays $30 a month for the service from Current Communications, an Internet service provider, which uses the power lines run by Cinergy, the local utility in Cincinnati. That cost is about $15 cheaper than comparable Internet access from either Cincinnati Bell or Time Warner Cable. The Current service can be piped into any electrical outlet in Hofstetter's home, with no reduction in speed even when he, his wife and their three daughters are online at the same time. All that is needed is a baseball-size jack that plugs into the wall and is connected to a computer with an Ethernet cable.

Known as broadband over power line, or BPL, the service is poised to challenge the cable and phone companies that dominate the high-speed Internet market. Instead of burying cables and rewiring homes, BPL providers use the local power grid, which means that any home with electricity could get the service.

[sportutegrl]

sorry, I meant bandwidth.

[thecabal]

Sorry to hear that about ham radio operators. Now for my world, when can I get the BPL here in AZ?

Well, the interference can work both ways. So if your local ham has to fire up his kilowatt amp in order to communicate and it wipes out your BPL, I won't shed any tears.

[PAR35]

Time to sell your cable TV and internet-over-cable stocks...

This isn't the only reason. Verizon is starting to offer cable TV to compete directly with Comcast and the others. And as they roll out the high speed internet connections, they are cutting DSL to $15/mo.

Now if they start offering tv signals over the power lines....

[Barney59]

Heck, I use the wiring in our house to extend the ethernet network... (a BELKIN Powerline Adapter) think about the robust nature of power line's and their obvious need for proper grounding and termination... sounds like a great idea to me!

[Eric in the Ozarks]

bring it on !

[thecabal]

ham radio is a mind bogglingly inefficient use of bandwith.

Do you know anything about radio at all? If you do, tell me how efficent CW is compared the other modes. Hell, how about SSB?

[pabianice]

Do they have a stock symbol yet?

No, but I got 36 hits using Copernic.

[Senator Bedfellow]

Wonder how they get around isolation transformers?

You don't. Either you need an optical bridge (boku $$$), or one of the cleverer solutions is that you basically use the power lines as a backbone feeding a set of wireless nodes.

[Rightly Biased]

For later

[ncountylee]

"that you basically use the power lines as a backbone feeding a set of wireless nodes."

Thank you.

[DManA]

The idea has been around for years.

By the time these pachyderms get off their duffs, the technology will have moved on.

[Arthalion]

Having just participated in the worldwide Boy Scout Jamboree On The Air this past weekend (as an adult leader), this is an unfortunate bit of news. Ham radio is an old hobby that is still enjoyed by a great number of people, and is quite often the springboard used by many young people who get into the communications professions. BPL has a good shot at killing the hobby in the US.

On the other side, it's also possible that ham's will simply try to boost their signals to talk over the BPL interference. This could seriously screw with the viability of BPL. These people are talking about offering everything from VOIP telephone service to Internet access to video on demand services via power lines...imagine losing access to ALL of that every time your neighbor flips on his shortwave rig. Remember, legally you're interfering with him, not the other way around. That section of the spectrum is legally set aside for ham use only...BPL is just so noisy that it interferes with hams legally reserved bandwidth.

[rawhide]

BPL is just so noisy that it interferes with hams legally reserved bandwidth

I would think the technology could overcome this problem. Acoording to the article, the company doing the BPL at present, has overcome this issue of interference with the ham radio frequencies.

[nevergore]

There is a technical component for the rural companies.....you aggregate DSL services on a D-Slam which the longest you can go from is around 12K feet for standard ADSL and 14K feet for SDSL.....many rural areas do not meet this standard....

NeverGore :^)

[Casloy]

When Hofstetter takes his computer to a different room in the house, he takes an adapter with him, plugs it in and is instantly connected to the Internet.

Big deal, if he put wireless in one central location he could wander the house and never plug into anything. Something strikes me as very, very fishy about this. I read an article in WIRED magazine just a year or two ago about a guy trying to develop this technology and there were some major roadblocks at that time having to do with getting the signal through transformers.

[OB1kNOb]

bookmark BTTT

[Barney59]

Can wire spec (volume) offset loss and shielding? I won't pretend to know but a hint of this stuff, my dad was a lineman so I have only smattering of info...

But the BELKIN adapter for the house works great!

[Fatuncle]

Simple economics.

The key is density of population. In power grids, com grids, and roads, the high number of customers in cities and urban areas subsidize the rural areas, which cannot generate enough income to pay for creating the infrastructure, though, once up and running, can usually maintain it.

As a very sloppy analogy, look at interstates and four-lane highways. They run where the traffic justifies their construction. The countryside gets back roads, and way out in the sticks, they aren't even paved.

I live in a small town near the coast of North Carolina, and am intimately familiar with lack of services cities only 35 miles away take for granted.