Via your electrical outlet. If this happens, it will put a lot of pressure on the cable and DSL providers to drop their prices.

The service has actually been around for a few years in select locales. There were some bleeding edge deployments in England that went belly-up because of radio interference and other problems. However, these were mostly resolved and deployments in parts of Ontario, Ohio and Virginia proceeded.

Broadband over Power Lines BPL Technology & Business Analysis

it will put a lot of pressure on the cable and DSL providers to drop their prices.

I have a feeling that, even if BPL could be run profitably at a retail price of $5 a month, it wouldn't be enough pressure to get cable companies to drop their rates. Instead, they would cite "lower subscriber numbers and falling profits" as an impetus to RAISE their prices.

I still don't understand the mentality behind cable pricing. I don't think anyone with any business sense can figure it out, either.

The big issue with BPL is that a lot of cables are essentially completely unshielded, so it all turns into a huge transmitter.

In the UK they had a lot of trouble with street lights:

a) when they switched on they threw a load of crud on the mains, and the network would go down for a few minutes at lighting up time. They managed to fix that (changed the packet length or something).

b) the street lights acted as huge antenna broadcasting for miles around. Installing filters worked, but pushed up costs.

But radiated noise is still a problem. There are things you can do, like introduce notches where radio users are; but even that didn't work great (the notching didn't work well; it was only 30dBa reduction IRC).

Sure, better equipment would always help, but now you're competing with a large installed base, as well as new technologies like WIMAX.

It's not that it can't work, it's more that it's harder to get to work than the other approaches, and that pushes up costs.

This was predicted around the time of the 1996 Telecom Act. In another 9 years, it will be coming to a street corner near you.

Quality of service is one thing -- but for would-be Internet users in the boonies, DSL is a no-go not because of technical limitations but because of perverse incentives introduced by Congress and federal regulators.

BPL could be limited in just the same way, leaving ruralites stuck with dial-up decades into the 21st century.

Didn't R2D2 pioneer this technology?? ;-)

In all seriousness, I wonder how many potential users will take a pass because they've got that mental image...

- Eric.

There still remains serious interference in the shortwave area of the spectrum (1 - approx 30 MHz), that has not in fact, been completely cleared up. And if that's not enough, some interference in the aircraft band, and portions of the UHF spectrum where public safety agencies operate, still exists.

I have to wonder if there's actually a market for this. Even if you don't have access to DSL or cable broadband, there's a competitor with superior range and bandwidth: fixed wireless. I have this (it's terrestrial, not satellite) and have been well pleased. It's economical to install even in fairly rural areas.

Don't you have security issues with that, Paul?

It's encrypted. Anyway, there are security concerns anywhere on the internet, and I suspect the emissions from broadband over power lines would also be fairly easy to tap.

I notice that "BPL Technology & Business Analysis" document doesn't list fixed wireless among BPL's competitors. Hmm.

It's encrypted.

How? WEP can be broken in a few seconds. I hope it's WPA.

It uses 128 bit keys, but beyond that I don't know.

I am not terribly worried, since this link on the outside of a firewall, and the packets could be intercepted anyway once they're on the internet. So there's no really compelling reason to make the link ultrasecure.

What about expense, Paul? How much does fixed wireless cost?

You can get details on the ISP's site. It's $50/month for the service I use (3 Mb/s peak download, 256Kb/s upload). You can't run a server from your home.

My one concern is lightning strikes -- but broadband over powerlines may have the same problem.

The main issue with security for wireless to access the internet is that of verification of the user- the provider doesn't really want just anyone using their internet access; only the ones that have ponied up the money.

VPN works well (I've used that) and can be arbitrarily secure. It's slight overkill, you don't really have to encrypt every packet you send over the internet; all the crucial connections should be https or ssh or whatever anyway. But it works.

This is the same wiring that hucksters are touting will improve your television reception?

Seems to me echoes and ghosting would be insurmountable problems.

Rich

For more information from the perspective of amateur (or "ham") radio operators, follow this link:

http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/

BPL might be a boon to some, but it's a gross radio-noise polluter to us hams.

73 de N3NYC