Interesting that they use EZ-tags for speed monitoring. They are here for the tolls in New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania on bridges, tollroads, and tunnels, but not for speed monitoring.
The cameras that they use for monitoring the freeways are all web cams. The cameras are mounted on office buildings that are already wired for Internet connectivity. I doubt there was a lot of expense involved in setting this up. The tunnels and bridges have dedicated wiring, but that was all put in as part of the $20B "Big Dig" boondoggle.
The Massachusetts water authority, which is responsible for the Quaban reservoir which supplies many of the towns including Boston and all of the states water reclamation and sewage is using WIRELESS to collect meter information. So is NSTAR for monitoring the gas meters at homes and businesses. NSTAR and other electrical power companies are planning to do the same for the power meters. So far no one has hacked into these systems and I suspect that it would be hard to do.
BPL just doesn't make sense up here. We already have two cable companies in most of our towns (Comcast and RCN), and Verizon has refitted the phone wiring and is already bringing fiber to the neighborhoods. Standard DSL speed has been increase to 3MPBS/256KPBS to compete with Cable data service. I am getting 6 MBPS/256KBPS at home for about $45 per month.
I don't know why the electrical utilities would want to put in BPL instead of using the EVO CDMA wireless or G3 GPRS services for the meters. The infrastructure is already in place and the network is fairly extensive.
