Tasmanian BPL Trial Buries Interference Debate

So they bury their power lines down under, down under.

Wow, Can you even check your email once a day with that much bandwidth?

I subscribed to about a dozen tech newsgroups through Comcasts Usenet which allowed 1GB a month. Since headers were counted I ran over about 22 days into each month. So the caps they describe are unusable IMO.

"The company is offering customers 256Kbps/64Kbps connections, including VoIP" Try using your connection and talking on the phone at the same time...

Ambient Completes First Project in New York City
Tuesday October 26, 2004 10:25 am ET
First to Commercially Deploy Second Generation Chipset Technology in North America

MADRID, SPAIN and NEWTON, MA--(MARKET WIRE)--Oct 26, 2004 -- Ambient Corporation (OTC BB:ABTG.OB - News), a leader in Power Line Communications (PLC) and a featured exhibitor at the IQPC International Powerline Communications Conference in Madrid announced today the successful completion of its joint project with Consolidated Edison (NYSE:ED - News) in the installation of a communications system in Con Edison's new First Avenue Steam Tunnel in Manhattan.

Kevin Burke, President of Con Edison, said, "We are pleased with the results of the project and its cost effectiveness. This state-of-the-art monitoring and communications system will serve us well."

Ambient, the first US company to incorporate the latest chipset from DS2 into its system, utilized DS2's second generation PLC technology, capable of running at speeds up to 200 Mbps, to build a multi-purpose communications network in an industrial environment. The network is utilized in Con Edison's new tunnel to monitor environmental conditions, the state of the steam main, and to provide telephony service in the tunnel utilizing the voice over IP (VoIP) technology provided by the DS2 chipset. This single network is a cost-effective solution that provides a variety of services that would traditionally have required multiple technologies and wiring systems.

Con Edison's steam system is unique to Manhattan. It serves about 1,800 customers from 105 miles of steam mains, stretching from Lower Manhattan to 96th Street.

Ram Rao, Chief Network Architect at Ambient, stated, "After years of successful demonstrations, Ambient is moving to a new level with near term plans to begin aggressively marketing its proven technology and equipment. The success of this project is another key step in Ambient's path to being the industry leader in PLC system design and installation."

"We at DS2 are pleased to have partners such as Ambient who have demonstrated their belief and commitment to aggressively pursue the market applications of the latest technology. They continue to demonstrate their market leadership in the Americas by proving the effectiveness of our latest technology in a real world environment. We are pleased to have a pioneering partner installing innovative technology in the company named after the man who pioneered electricity," added Jorge Blasco, CEO of DS2.

About Ambient Corporation

I really have no thoughts on BPL, but if it helps bring broadband to the masses, and without interference, I am down for it.

considering that web pages these days contain around 500kb to 1mb of ugly adds and flash content, you could easily hit the rediculous capped limit of 20 MB in literally 5 minutes (if not sooner).

BPL sucks and so do caps therefore TasTel sucks

Granted, they do suck. But for the people who will never have another option, this is a good one IF it works properly.

The bandwidth offered is small in BPL in most cases. As technology rolls the bandwidth will be in the order of dial-up soon making the investment in BPL technology not worth and the companies deploying BPL might not recover cost as well (forget for a moment such draconian bandwidth caps mentioned in the article and interference isues)

It was pushed by former FCC chairman to give the illusion of competitive market as an excuse to lift regulations on Telco. Now, that most of those regulations are already removed there is no point pushing this. We now live essentially a CableCo and Telco duopoly with the balance of scale moving in favor of Telcos.

For under-served communities WiMAX and Wi-Fi present a much better alternatives while Fiber is the way of future for both Telco and CableCos.

and 12 down/1 up sounds VERY nice. I'd definitely switch if that were here.

While the burying of the line has been broached before as a possible means of getting rid of much of the interference, the thought of 200 MB a month cap is a JOKE! Especially since they are touting a 1Mb/256kb line for AU$30 (about US$22.50) at that level.

Oh well, BPL is much more expensive than other methods it appears.

In Australia this is normal, all broadband services above 256 are charged per GB. They're merely follow the other broadband providers.

I'd rather go to iridium 9600 baud and wait an hour for one page to load then deal with those caps...you CANNOT get rid of the interfearence....Cause those wires were ment to carry 60hz or 50z depending on the country...DEAL WITH IT!!The BPL network in Michigan trials isnt even up yet! The company website no longer exists! Its a dead tech...bury it (pun intended) and leave it be...if they REALLY want to bring broadband to the masses then up the caps on dial-up to the true 128k speeds modems are capable of...that would work better then BPL I'll tell you that.

Modems are Capable of 128k? Bullsh!t.

Read the speed diags of a modem and most newer ones will say at some point max speed 128k...no joke

Never heard of such a thing.

Surely, that must be a miss-print. 20 megs a month isn't worth 15 dollars, no matter what the connection speed is. I wouldn't pay that much for 20 megs a day. Even though it's a newsgroup, not an ISP, Free.teranews.com allows 50 meg down a day...for free!

I could do 20 easily on dial-up. This shouldn't even be called broadband.

"despite the buried lines, they're still fielding interference complaints"

Underground lines only attenuate the "radiated" signal by about 3db or so plus or minus depth and surrounding objects. When you're dealing with 30db+ of radiated signal that isn't much of a fix, besides when the wires come up into the buildings above ground every one of those again radiates just as bad as not being buryed in the first place. Nice try but no cigar pro-BPL ones.