| BPL is the worst choice for rural areas The totally bogus claim that BPL is suitable choice for rural deployment is one of the many lies along with “no interference” propagated by the BPL morons. The BPL strategy is to get the FCC to ignore the high levels of interference / spectrum pollution as the FCC wants to get broadband to communities that don’t have it
In reality, if the BPL companies succeed, they will abandon the rural areas and immediately focus on the wealthy suburban markets that are profitable and already have cable and DSL.
Check the numbers - DSL can work out to about ~ 16,000 feet from the central office. BPL can only go 2,000 feet from the BPL equivalent of a DSLAM, then it needs an expensive repeater installed by an linesman trained to work with 11,000 volt cables. So for a 16,000 foot run 8 BPL repeaters are needed.
At the customer’s pole transformer a bridge needs to be installed to couple the signals from the 11,000 volt line to your 110 volt line, if this bridge fails, say from a lightning strike you will have 11,000 volts on all of your outlets – ouch!
However the math is worked, there is no way the power companies can implement this vast array of expensive equipment in rural areas with any hope of meeting the projected pricing.
The existing DSL broadband technology is proven and could be provided to almost everyone who has a phone, the barriers are political (and FCC failure) not technical. The solution to universal broadband lies in ensuring the phone companies serve all of their customers equally. BPL is a broken legacy technology that is a pure distraction to the objective of universal broadband. |
