new internet technology

[shazam]

I recieve a quarterly magazine from the power company. One article mentions a new tech. called BPL broadband over powerline. The article implies that they are makeing great strides. Does anyone else have any info. on this and what are your thoughts.

[mbossman2]

Utility companies (especially electrical) are the only entities that have 100% connections to 100% of the structures in a country and it only makes sense that they attempt to offer other services to their customers other than electricity.

There are some technical kinks to straighten out: like how to connect a router to a line that has 100000 volts (or some other ridiculous amount of power running thru it) without blowing it up as well as ensuring data integrity, but that may very well be the future of backbone connections, especially in countries that have a predominantly wireless phone services (like many developing countries)

[shazam]

mbooman2 This comes from a utility co. in south west N.C. They also offer dial up and dsl.

[jong2k4]

Originally Posted by mbossman2 Utility companies (especially electrical) are the only entities that have 100% connections to 100% of the structures in a country

Hehe, fun factoid: I once knew a person who lived for a few weeks in a house with no electrical connection. He had been acting in England for about 10 years after high school until he moved to Texas to start college. (He's actually been in a movie that was small and did reasonably well, he played Billy Daniels in a movie called The Day the Music Died or something like that- anyone seen it?) He bought a house that was fairly near the school, but for some reason it happened to have no electricity. It was a pretty good deal so he decided to live with the house and consider it an experiment, but of course after a couple of weeks it was hell.

He called the power company and asked them how much it would cost to run a line to the house- as it happened, it required putting in three new utility poles to run a line over to his house. The bill: about $45. I don't have any idea what the going rate is for installing utility poles, but if I had to hazard a guess, three utility poles installed should probably be going for thousands of dollars. The lesson: once you're locked in as a customer, the power companies anticipate getting a LOT of money from you over the course of the life of the infrastructure delivering energy to you.

[roomwithamoose]

The whole "broadband over powerlines" idea has been around for a while, or at least as long as broadband. Europe is really working on it, but the States don't seem to care as much. The problems are pretty big, like mbossman2 mentioned with the conversion factor. It's hard to get away from the 1000 kilovolts in powerlines. It's a great idea, but there's no infrastructure to support it, and not a big enough market to support the infrastructure needed. It'll be awhile until we see this happen big time.

[bailey]

that is not the only major problem that is in the works.
running a broadband rf signal over a long cable need to be shielded as the standard cable tv systems are.
running this same type of signal over a wire that is not shielded will cause interferance to all radio communication used in the spectrum used by the broadband signal, there is a lot of unhappy comunications people that are fighting this as it would make all modes of communication by radio useless.

I know it would make my amature radio ham station a bunch of expensive junk if this does in fact happen.