Cincinnati Plugs In > Where's the proof?

Where's the proof?

Certainly... here's a page with links to a lot of studies done by the ARRL labs.

»www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/

reply to Beaker74
Seems reading the article sheds a little light..

Shark said the only commercial deployment of BPL now is in Manassas, Va., where the municipality has teamed with a New York investment firm to market the capability to about 15,000 homes

Yes you post an interesting question. I also have been waiting for the complaints from the Manassas area hams and others to surface after wide area deployment. I have not heard much on this or the deployment yet. They should be on the forefront as far as deployment size by now, but have not heard squat. During the "test site phase", they were only a few blocks big, and incedentally no hams lived near this "test" area. Now I do know that any interference complaints from government entities will remain internal, and any complaints to the FCC or the companies responsible would probably also remain internal only. Why would they release that kind of info. when they are pushing this so hard. Only time will tell I'm afraid, and after enough time has passed, and enough money has been dumped into deployments, it will be too late by the time we do hear of any complaints leaks.

reply to Beaker74
The problem with interference is multi-faceted and to some extent difficult to fully comprehend. The HF radio spectrum is a different animal, different than all other radio spectrum. A very low powered signal can propagate hundreds or thousands of miles.

The trial areas are a bit misleading as some of the problems we see won't fully manifest themselves until full scale rollouts occur. BPL providers are basically hedging their bets that they can coexist in HF spectrum by tweaking their systems to not use frequencies that aren't in use locally. The assumption is that they won't interfere locally with anyone and should be fine. Due to the propagation characteristics of HF, it's likely long distance interference or an increased noise floor across the HF bands could occur. Such problems are hard to track down to a particular system and hundreds of these systems operating across the country could have a cumulative effect.

The other misnomer with the trials is scalability. As the subscribers are added, more bandwidth is needed, so more network segmentation needs to occur. This means that more chunks of HF spectrum will be needed in a given area. At some point, it will be impossible for a BPL provider to not avoid local interference as they will need all of the HF spectrum to operate their system.

Most of these trial areas have claimed no interference issues due to lack of complaints. This is analogous to saying you don't smell anything, meanwhile your furnace is malfunctioning and filling your house with carbon monoxide. BPL proponents have provided only anecdotal evidence to the FCC while those opposing BPL due to interference issues and potential have filed computer models and field measurements.

BPL also has issues with ingress interference, or interference into the system from outside sources. BPL from a regulatory standpoint has no protection from such interference.

As a side note, the ARRL page shouldn't be considered "one source" as it links to a myriad of other ARRL unrelated sites. In essence it's more a portal for information that you should look at. Other countries have tried BPL over the past five or six years and have met with failure. This is being presented as a new high technology item in the US by many, but the reality is that it's not.

reply to w2co

said by w2co:

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Yes you post an interesting question. I also have been waiting for the complaints from the Manassas area hams and others to surface after wide area deployment. I have not heard much on this or the deployment yet. They should be on the forefront as far as deployment size by now, but have not heard squat. During the "test site phase", they were only a few blocks big, and incedentally no hams lived near this "test" area. Now I do know that any interference complaints from government entities will remain internal, and any complaints to the FCC or the companies responsible would probably also remain internal only. Why would they release that kind of info. when they are pushing this so hard. Only time will tell I'm afraid, and after enough time has passed, and enough money has been dumped into deployments, it will be too late by the time we do hear of any complaints leaks.

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reply to rf_engineer
where can I get more technical specs of how broadband internet would be delivered through the existing electric wires?

reply to wentlanc
Well I did a search on the area on QRZ.com (last year) it will show me any "licensed" hams within a user defined area, or I can look up any single callsign as well. Last May it showed not a licensed ham within 20 blocks of the Manassas test site area. There are many sources on this information. Another source is the FCC ULS database, there a little more hard to use but is where all the others get their data from. As for government complaints, they are banned from making any public complaints, and if they do complain, they will go directly to the FCC (internal process). As I've mentioned they (FCC and power company involved in a complaint) at this phase of deployment will probably not release negative information on a technology that they are both pushing so hard. This is America after all.

reply to rf_engineer

Scalability, segmentation and fiber

said by bonnyman:

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RF engineer wrote:
"The other misnomer with the trials is scalability. As the subscribers are added, more bandwidth is needed, so more network segmentation needs to occur. This means that more chunks of HF spectrum will be needed in a given area. At some point, it will be impossible for a BPL provider to not avoid local interference as they will need all of the HF spectrum to operate their system."

The current thinking is that as bandwidth demands increase or the amount of available spectrum in an area decreases, the utilities will reduce the size of their service cells. That is, they will serve fewer customers from any one injection point. There networks would evolve over time to have more injection points serving smaller clusters of customers and more fiber (for backhaul from the injection point).

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reply to bonnyman

quote:

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The current thinking is that as bandwidth demands increase or the amount of available spectrum in an area decreases, the utilities will reduce the size of their service cells. That is, they will serve fewer customers from any one injection point. There networks would evolve over time to have more injection points serving smaller clusters of customers and more fiber (for backhaul from the injection point).

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reply to rf_engineer
Interesting points brought up by all.. I appreciate this being more of a discussion than an arguement between BPL advocates and Amatuer Radio hobbyists.. I guess we'll have to keep a look out to see as services begin to roll-out and the system tries to ramp up, how badly or mildly it will cause RF interference. I, for one, hope not, as I wouldn't want to ruin an entire industry of HAM radio people. Interesting times lie ahead, regardless.

Yes and don't forget that hams make up only about 6% of the users in this spectrum, 1-30Mhz anyway, and the rest are either government or other. The fact that hams are not limited in their capabilities of making their opinions known in matters like this is why you hear much more from hams than anyone else. They (the others) simply can't comment. But we all are federally licensed to use this spectrum.

reply to A_Ham

Re: Where's the proof?

said by bolt:

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That's not what you could hardly call an "objective" site. Are there any unbiased reports of wide-spread problems?

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