Broadband Over Power Lines: Coming Soon?

Decaffeinated Jedi writes "With technology improving and costs droppings, News.com offers up an interesting report on renewed interest in delivering broadband Internet access via power lines (a technology known as BPL). Earlier this month, the Federal Communications Commission proposed a new set of rules for utility companies that might want to offer BPL services as a way to 'encourage broadband for the entire United States' -- particularly hard-to-reach rural areas. As the article notes, EarthLink has already started testing BPL service in using power lines leased in Wake County, North Carolina. Could cable and DSL face a new competitor in the broadband market in the near future?"

Let's hope not...

[CountBrass]

Powerlines were not designed to carry RF. It'll bleed all over the spectrum and disrupt radio hams, cell phones, cordless phones, tv remotes and yes all those lovely WiFi and Bluetooth devices.

And surprise surprise the FCC, the regulator, seems to have conveniently ignored these "inconveniences".

See the ARRL web site for more objections and to give your support to their objects.

Edward - Ham: M3EWK.

BPL is vapourware!

[anonymous coword]

I keep hearing about this, every few months on slashdot about how "Broadband over Powerlines" are "just around the corner" or trialing! But every time they get cancled due to intererance and practibillity concerns! I wish slashdot would stop posting about it until it is actually being sold in the mainstream!

well

[CubeHard]

I have read that BPL has already been tested in other countries, with less than fantastic results. And while it would be able to help outlying areas, they could opt for satellite access, if they really wanted broadband. Also, would this put a strain on the already antiquated power infrastructure in America? But perhaps its implement would cause a slow infrastructure re-haul, as people would depend on the lines for more than just power now.

Re:BPL Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, for the technology in question earlier.

Now, have the manufacturers (Cisco? Siemens? Whoever came up with the hardware to do this?) done anything to mitigate the interference? Like pushing it into the TV band(s), where digital ATSC is supposed to help us ignore QRM? ;)

Anyone know if HomePlug is equally offensive (on a smaller, but much more distributed, scale)?

Transformers are still a problem....

[CodeGorilla]

How does the BPL handle connectivity around the transformers? Either they are using an RF bypass, or they are using a fiber bypass. Then comes the issue of maintenance. The RF units should be easier and cheaper to maintain, but they have durability issues compared to fiber. On the other hand, fiber bypasses are more expensive to install and maintain, but once in place, they should be more durable than the RF counterparts.

Moreover, I *STILL* haven't seen specs for BPL which make it fiscally viable except for rural communities where cable/DSL/wireless have not yet penetrated.

Though...

[RedShoeRider]

...line spikes are a pretty common problem in most of the country (or at least out in the woods where I am), and must run a UPS or line supressor on everything that I value that's plugged into a wall. Assuming that I had a broadband over powerline modem, it would need the wall outlet for both power and for signal. That's a given.

So say I put one of my UPS's on the line (such as a TrippLite w/ISOBAR, which are really great for line noise supression)...does that mean my signal gets filtered out? So I have to leave the line unsupressed, and everytime we have a lightning strike in the area (at least 3-4 times a year), I'm calling the electric company to cmoe replace another fried modem? Do I have to purchase a special ($$$$) supressor from the electric company that has a bandgap filter just for that frequency?

Seems as if there are too many variables once you are inside the house, nevermind the problems with Ham bands, Bluetooth, etc.

I say stop waiting for it

[Skrekkur]

I dont understand what the fuzz is about, around broadband over powerlines. It has been in use here in iceland for quite the while now, and my experience of it, is that its laggy (around 500 ms) and the speed is rather unstable, since its based on how many are using it at the moment. I admit its rather cool to connect your modem into a powersocket instead of a phonesocket but its not much more than that, here at least adsl 1,5 mbit is cheaper, and faster, the only thing power has over that is it uploads as fast as it downloads.

Re:Ham Operators....

[tlhIngan]

Except, well, people need *practice*. And equipment needs to be *purchased* and *maintained*. Would you buy the latest gaming PC (or Mac) (the investment is similar), only to find that you are allowed to use it, say, the first weekend of a leap year?

Oh, BTW, low-frequency signals easily traverse the globe. A localized blackout like August 2003 may still result in communications failure because of interference from the other end of the country (where there *is* power).

And let's not forget everyone *ELSE* in the HF bands - we've got military, aviation (HF is the only way to communicate long distances), marine, broadcast (SW especially), CB, RC, cordless phones, etc. who use it for its special properties. Sure we can all switch to satellite, but are you willing to shell out the increased costs for satellite equipment in everything you do (taxes, shipping costs, tickets, imported goods...)? (As if we need *another* reason for companies to jack prices up!)

OTOH, it does make spying on internet traffic easier - sniff passwords 3000 miles away! Or someone will find a way to do BPL wardriving (imagine that... hitching internet service from someone in the next state! Though, this would lead to more spam...) Damn I'm conflicted.

(Then there is the fact that HAM radio is a regulated service, and BPL is unregulated.)

Re:Good Lord

[Shipwright]

I am replying to your post over my 26.4 modem connection, 7 miles of copper from the CO. The cable operator in my country is the bankrupt Adelphia, they laugh and hang up when I call about timelines for getting service. Verizon would probably not provide even phone service to the farmers out here unless someone made them. BPL is my only hope for broadband. There cannot be enough articles about it.

BPL Banned in Austria

[Zappa]

Having the same problems for HAM operators, they tried to stop the BPL Test in Austria.
The ministry responsible for this stated that the HAM services in emergency cases are more important and stopped the testlicense.
Heres the Press Info [oevsv.at] (sorry, its a PDF) from OEVSV [oevsv.at], the Austrian HAM assosiation.

interference

[yet_another_user]

Its easy for people who lives in areas where dsl or cable or something even better is available, that BPL is bad, it will interfere with ham and wifi stuff and whatnot.
Personally I can't say I will be too sad if my neighbour can't play with his ham radio anymore, if that means that I can ditch my modem (with the crappy lines out here, 28k8 max). Yay FCC, for once.

I'm a layman in the area, but if the interference is WAY too bad, can't they install some sort of noisereducing filters on the repeaters? Or will the actual lines emit just as much interference?

Fibre

[Draoi]

Here in Ireland, our national electricity org, in an uncharacteristic moment of foresight, bundled fibre optic cables along with its high-power lines. No RF bleedoff issues, no crossover problems, etc, etc. The network was already there & it was just a matter of phasing in the fibre when upgrading lines. They did this very, very quietly indeed!

Link here [www.esb.ie] for those interested.

Now all we need is for our national telco [eircom.ie] to roll out ADSL in a meaningful [irelandoffline.org] kinda way ... :-/

Re:Don't care

[loucura!]

Unfortunately, for you, that portion of the spectrum is allocated in accordance with International Treaty, which means that Constitutionally, it has Federal Force of Law. Good luck going through Congress and getting that Repealed, especially since FEMA uses Ham Frequencies and Hams themselves.

BPL Bad Indeed

[Pan T. Hose]

It tramples over many frequencies used by FEMA and Ham Operators. Ick!

Oh yes, that's very important indeed. But what I'd say is at least equally important issue with Broadband Over Power Lines is that little problem that, well, it's a fucking scam for god's sake!

I have written about it countless times [slashdot.org]. Please let me quote my last post about this very issue:

I just cannot believe this thing is still around. The only reason people started trying to use power lines for broadband in the first place was not because of the actual properties of power grid as we know it (most of the comments here talk about the obvious inefficiencies, so I won't talk about it), but a completely new theory invented by Luke Stewart who promised more than billion gigabits per second (sic) with his Media Fusion scam. I suppose Earthlink investors don't know how to use Google [google.com], so please let me quote a Wired article from 2001, by Evan Ratliff:

Luke Stewart boldly sold politicians, businesspeople, and financiers on his trillion-dollar idea: Use the electrical grid to carry data at speeds faster than we've ever seen. Never mind how.

Inventor William "Luke" Stewart is a genuine national treasure, the kind of person who comes along once, maybe twice, in a century. How do I know? Well, I heard it from business executives, congressmembers, academics, military leaders, journalists. These people met Luke Stewart, sized him up, and concluded that his scientific intellect was virtually unparalleled. His ideas, they said, could alter not only the future of the Internet but the fate of humanity itself.

But sometimes you have to go straight to the source. The real reason I know that Luke Stewart is a national treasure - and, I suspect, the reason that all those other people did, too - is that he told me so himself.

[...] The idea of sending information via the electrical grid, rather than over telephone copper or fiber-optic cable, has been around for decades. The field, known as power line communications, or PLC, is pockmarked with wasted investments and technical failures. Only within the past few months have several companies begun to deploy limited PLC ventures.

[...] Stewart, however, had a much grander vision, based on what he considered to be a dramatic discovery: Data could hitch a ride on the magnetic field created by electric currents running through power line wires. By piggybacking on this magnetic field, instead of on the electricity itself, he could obtain almost limitless speeds of transmission.

[...] Media Fusion promised to deliver, within two years, bandwidth at speeds thousands of times faster than what's possible with fiber. Stewart was company chair, while the board of directors included government heavyweights such as former Speaker of the House Robert Livingston; Terry McAullife, a leading Democratic fund-raiser and close friend of then-President Clinton; and Admiral James Carey, former chair of the Federal Maritime Commission. The firm's Web site declared that the ASCM technology would "impact every facet of our life," and the computing power of the network would be "exponentially more powerful than any supercomputer to date." [emphasis added]

[...] So Luke Stewart - self-proclaimed national treasure - carries on. Chances are, we haven't heard the last of him, [how true...] because Stewart sold his vision best to the one person who will never pull the plug: himself.

Read the whole article and Google around for more informations. It is a very interesting scam and quite a successful one at that. Maybe that's not homeopathy but it is impressive nonetheless.

Investors, repeat after me: Google [google.com] is your friend.

Re:Broadband over anal beads

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it me or is the number of bad, tastless posts risen dramatically since the last 2 weeks? There have been some really nasty posts recently, many racists and more that what the average was only a month ago.

Anybody have a clue on why this sudden rise?

Go ahead, use BPL.

[Anonymous Coward]

Go ahead, use BPL. Just be aware that you're pissing off the ham operators, and think about this: the powerline is an effective antenna. It can not only transmit, but receive. It'll be quite easy for hams to simply put out a strong signal and destroy your internet connection.

And, most likely, there will be nothing you can legally do to stop that, because they have priority on those frequencies.

Only an idiot would choose a transmission medium that can be so easily disrupted remotely and covertly. I can drive around with a van destroying the internet for hundreds of thousands of people at a time. And depending on the power level, it's totally legal.

Oh, and thanks for sending all your traffic over a gigantic antenna. I'll have fun cracking the pathetic DES encryption and reading all your private stuff.

Re:How about internet over water pipes

[cruachan]

Well, that isn't quite so far out as you might think.

Here in the UK we have quite a lot of canals left over from the early industrial revolution, and as many of these predate railways they tend to be small in size, but with a much more extensive network than in countries where canal building started later. They're not used for freight now really, but in recent years there's been quite a boon in the leisure industry and many have been restored.

Obviouly though the state company that owns them - British Waterways - has ended up with lots of narrow strips of land connecting large centres of population. So there's now quite a lot of telecoms traffic carried by canal - or more precisely cables buried under canal towpaths: http://www.britishwaterways.co.uk/site/Developingo urBusiness_2238.asp

I've also heard of at least one company that was laying cables along sewers.

What about fixed wireless?

[wsanders]

As a ham, I think if we can stop this technology long enough, not forever, it will be leapfrogged by ubiquitous fixed wireless service. Then you don't have to worry about the Cable Guy climbing up on a pole and messing with 19.2 kV wiring, you don't have to worry about interference, etc.etc. The current NRPM is just to placate the utility lobbyists and their whores at the FCC.

Already, in some rural areas, there is high-quality paid service based on WiFi. http://www.dslreports.com/dosearch reports 788 wireless plans, many in rural or semi-rural areas.

Theory

[Tin Britches]

The upper frequency limits of BPL are supposed
to be 80 MHZ. Nyquist give us a limit on sample
rate. Shannon tells us that noise is also to be
reckoned with. Our data rate will be lower than
theoretical (what a surprise!). Look at all the
noise; crosstalk, corona discharge (power lines
are very noisey on their own), the proclivity of
power lines to act as antennas (receive and
transmit). You will very quickly see the nature
of power lines themselves throttling back your
useful bandwidth.

You will be sharing your particular piece of
this proposed vast collision domain with everyone else on your network segment and possibly even
more than them. Bye bye more bandwidth.

Now consider that nature throws electrical
storms, high winds that wiggle the connections
constantly, extreme temperature swings, earth
tremors, ect., to the point that what you get
is the physical world punching your network
(hence it's bandwidth) right in the face with
even more interference.

Also, the next time you're out driving around,
take a look at all the fuses, disconnects, and
other control apparati the power companies put
up on the poles to control and isolate segments,
and you end up with a lot of points of failure
that are exposed to the physical world. Power
lines were engineered first and foremost to
deliver POWER to customers. The infrastructure
put in place is designed specifically for this.
Data is a Johnny-come-lately the infrastructure wasn't engineered for. A lot of retrofits are in
store just to get things working at all, much
less well.

Oh, and a UPS isn't going to keep you online if
a lightning strike blows one of those fuses
up on the pole. The segment will become isolated
(without any connectivity) if that happens.

Oh well. If you have a UPS and have the phone
modem still installed in your computer, you can
dial-up. Right?

By the way. The FCC isn't the only entity with
a say-so over the RF spectrum. The NTIA regulates
radio for the federal government (Yes folks. Once
again, what's sauce for us geese, isn't sauce for them ganders!). ...Point is; the NTIA doesn't
seem to like BPL much, either.

Re:BPL Bad

[tmasssey]

And that's exactly how the Amateur Radio community usually works. If you've got someone on 10 meters that's interfering with TV, it's *far* easier to build a filter for them than to say, "eat it, I've got the license." And I have a feeling that's how the *vast* majority of licensees would handle it.

But when you *do* have the license, and their horribly cheap TV is poorly (or better yet, improperly) built, with a front end that a walkie-talkie could overload, then what? I'm not buying you a new TV, and I *DO* have the FEDERAL LICENSE, and the RIGHT to the frequency I'm using!

Sombody has to have the upper hand. The government has decided that Amateur Radio has advantages such that they are willing to give us Primary use of a few narrowly defined frequencies, and Secondary use of a few more. These frequencies were not given to us. They were allocated for us, in exchange for our using them for the public good: emergency communication, etc. You may not see it as important, but the government does. Until the government, by law, changes this, that's how it works.

Re:BPL Bad

[KC7GR]

That's exactly what worries me. It almost seems like BPL was invented to help create bad blood between hams (and other radio users, like FEMA) and the Internet industry.

Then again, there is the line about never mistaking malice for stupidity. It is also entirely possible that the whole idea for BPL was dreamed up by the same kinds of people who were ultimately responsible for the dot-bomb implosion: More specifically, marketing types who have less than zero clue about even the most basic principles surrounding RF energy, antennas, and transmission lines.

I still predict that BPL is going to be a spectacular failure, and not necessarily because of its interference to (and susceptibility to interference from) amateur frequencies. I really think the FCC, especially Michael Powell, has lost touch with reality if they're not even willing to listen to FEMA, let alone who knows how many other engineers and techies who have already said "This is a Bad Idea. Don't do it" in one form or another.

In short: The U.S. Government, including the FBI, Secret Service, NSA, and all branches of the military, are big users of all kinds of radios, on frequecies that literally go from VLF to near-daylight. How long do you think BPL will last once it starts interfering with, say, aircraft-to-ground comms at your local air force base or civilian airport, marine HF, or Naval radio traffic?

Re:BPL Bad

[KD5YPT]

Here's a good fact to say why HAM radio is important...
1. During the 9/11 incident, the only type of communication available are ham radios (all other either got clogged up, or went down because of power outtage).
2. During the Columbia shuttle incidence, HAM operator helped located a large number (don't know the exact count) of shuttle debrises.

Re:oh sure, great...

[zerocool^]

See, I think you overestimate the intelligence of UPS's.

The Triplite BCPro's that I've modded are obviously stupid.

However, I've done this to APC "SmartUPS"s, and, despite their name actually having "smart" in it, they're equally dumb. They have no internal computer or timer or clock or processor of any kind. They only work by (for charging) pushing out 52 volts as (load+5amps), and when the batteries push back at 52, it drops back down to expecting 48 volts, and only pulling (load) from the wall. Regardless of the time it takes.

NOW, KEEP IN MIND... This solution is for running 25 computers for 2 hours, NOT for running one computer for 20 hours. It's just that the origional capacity of the SmartUPSs is 12 amp-hours. Pulling 15 amps, that's only 45 minutes of backup, and we didn't like that.

~Will