More PLC Worries Australia doubts technology's practicality Broadband over power-line technology continues its world-wide popularity plunge. - While there's certainly a growing number of people realizing the possibility of PLC (power-line connectivity) solutions, the technology is quickly becoming the butt of jokes, and there's a growing number beginning to see that the technology's interference concerns could stop it dead in its tracks. The promise of a third competitive front in the broadband sector (in turn driving down costs for DSL and cable) certainly is alluring, but world-wide many of the trials have failed due to expense or interference with emergency and amateur radio communications. That theme continues this week in Australia, where the Australian Communications Authority issued new concerns that "new & sexy" does not always a promising broadband alternative make. The authority, already worried about the country's power backbone's ability to carry broadband signals, worries that an overly enthusiastic rollout of the technology could be met with disastrous (or at least ineffective) results.
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  aSicapplication specificPremium
join:2001-05-17
Wakulla, FL
| Its amazing... The truth about BPL is beginning to come out..all around the world: The "third leg" of broadband isnt worth the interference it causes.
Kind of amusing that the Aussies are also citing the interference between BPL and HF radio, but adding on one other thing. Interference amongst users. I never really considered that idea. I can see it now..everything below 80Mhz wiped out by data flowing into peoples homes, BPL users complaining about it being slow because the network is crowded and Joe P2P down the road is interfering with Mary Janes broadband experience. I dont even want to think of the harmonics involved.. :\
KE4SOX
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Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say. | irc.fj33r.com #dslr
[text was edited by author 2003-09-23 15:48:47] | |
|  | wtansillNcc1701
join:2000-10-10
Falls Church, VA
| Re: Its amazing... said by aSic:
The truth about BPL is beginning to come out..all around the world: The "third leg" of broadband isnt worth the interference it causes.
Kind of amusing that the Aussies are also citing the interference between BPL and HF radio, but adding on one other thing. Interference amongst users. I never really considered that idea. I can see it now..everything below 80Mhz wiped out by data flowing into peoples homes, BPL users complaining about it being slow because the network is crowded and Joe P2P down the road is interfering with Mary Janes broadband experience. I dont even want to think of the harmonics involved.. :\
KE4SOX
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Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say. | irc.fj33r.com #dslr
[text was edited by author 2003-09-23 15:48:47]
Hmmm -- weren't the hams all over this a few weeks ago? Well waddaya know; looks like they were right...
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That which does not kill me merely prolongs the agony. | |
| |  drjimPremium,MVM
join:2000-06-13
Long Beach, CA
kudos:3
 ·Verizon FiOS
| The new QST has an article (and editorial) on this. It's amusing to read the replies by the proponents of this technology. Looks like they spent their money on Marketing, NOT Engineering!
Jim KQ6EA
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One man's Magic is another man's Engineering.
[text was edited by author 2003-09-23 18:19:00] | |
| | |  TransmasterDon't Blame Me I Voted For Bill and Opus
join:2001-06-20
Cheyenne, WY
| Re: Its amazing... CARTOON FROM 1939 RADIO MAGAZINE HANDBOOK
We have been told we are old fashion and out of date. Well we do know RF and it's nice to see everything we have
said about this energy company scam is true.
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Low Brass & Irish Terriers rule, and I love the warm glow of a vacuum tube in the morning
[text was edited by author 2003-09-24 01:54:59]
[text was edited by author 2003-09-24 02:08:29]
[text was edited by author 2003-09-24 02:10:12] | |
| | | w2co
join:2003-07-16
Longmont, CO | Yes it's really funny when "marketing bean counting lawyer types" try to sound technical. WAIVE GUIDE? come on. If the companies responsible for this huge waste of time and money would've just looked at the existing studies from others, they would've been way ahead. GO FIBER! | |
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|  TopmounterSent By Grocery Clerks
join:2001-02-20
Evergreen, CO | I just knew the RECC should have required properly shielded power cabling and outlets.
What a shame.
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"If PCs are hard, then Macs are flaccid" -bb | |
| | | drjimPremium,MVM
join:2000-06-13
Long Beach, CA
kudos:3 |  Re: Its amazing...
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One man's Magic is another man's Engineering. | |
| | | | | | Re: Its amazing... said by drjim:
I just wonder what the cost of "Properly Shielded" powerlines everywhere would cost?
It's called coax or fiber. The telcos and cable companies have been stringing it up for years. The utility companies really should check it out !  | |
| | | | | | | Re: Its amazing... Please! Tell me what coax they can use to transmit 17,000 volts at many hundreds or thousands of amps..... in fact, tell me how they can send any voltage at all over a fiberoptic cable. (Its made of glass or plastic, isn't it?)
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 LinkTechFormer Linksys TechVIP
join:2002-07-02
Mission Viejo, CA | My Thoughts Would this make a surge supressor a router? LOL.... | |
| | w2co
join:2003-07-16
Longmont, CO | Re: My Thoughts N0 surge supressors and UPS equipment will only block the BPL signals to that outlet, and greatly attenuate the signal to nearby rooms. | |
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 mrchrisOut and aroundPremium
join:2002-10-01
North Babylon, NY
| Australia is behind...so is Poland... They are a bit behind in broadband technology, 512kbps down and 128 up, plus download caps? Get with the picture Telstra and get to the common broadband provider specs ( 1.5 down/256 up, no download caps, no retarded domain restricting from other countries, they do this on www.planetmirror.com ).
Also Poland is severly behind in broadband. They still think 128k ISDN is state of the art. LOL. Someone please write to the knuckleheads there so their country gets better connections.
[text was edited by author 2003-09-23 17:27:00] | |
| | | | Re: Australia is behind...so is Poland... So why am I using a 512/128 ?? I'm in Poland and while broadband certainly isn't as widespread as in many other countries, ISDN is by no means thought to be state of the art...
The standard broadband connection in Pl right now is 512/128 without caps or in my case ( cuz of the cable co. ) a downstream cap of 15GB. Some companies offer higher speeds with an interesting example of the sewage company in the city of Wroclaw which in co-operation with an ISP is introducing Metro-Ethernet. Th speeds are comparable to FTTH with the end users having speeds of ~10Mbps.
Just try to do a little research before writting | |
| | | mrchrisOut and aroundPremium
join:2002-10-01
North Babylon, NY
| Re: Australia is behind...so is Poland... Well, from someone else on an IRC network is where I got my info, so I may have been misinformed. Yes, Poland needs better broadband distribution. Hell, broadband needs to be widely available in USA the way Sweden does!
/me growls at the Telcos and ILECs...
[text was edited by author 2003-09-23 17:50:07] | |
| | | | | | Re: Australia is behind...so is Poland... Well, some info - probably the ISDN that You heard about was something called SDI here in Poland. It's an old technology developed by Ericsson that allowed a theoretical 160Kbps but was limited to 115...
The telco structure in Poland is the one thing that makes ay kind of competition almost impossible. Telekomunikacja Polska S.A a nationwide monopoly ( a company that controls over 60% of everything telecom related and backed by France Telecom which owns 33% of it ) is the main reason for slow broadband deployement and although now DSL coverage should be about 60% of the population, the prices are set too high for the average person ( and way to high considering the speed... ).
I'd love for broadband to be as available as in Sweden or The Netherlands. The reality however is that without any serious companies that would be able to put up a fight with "our beloved monopoly"  broadband in Poland won't get any faster or cheaper... | |
| | | | | mrchrisOut and aroundPremium
join:2002-10-01
North Babylon, NY | Re: Australia is behind...so is Poland... I feel bad for you too, monopolies over phone stuff ain't very well, look at some areas in America for example. Only the people can make a change | |
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| | | And here I am stuck with iDSL (DSL over IDSN) just outside Seattle, WA, USA not far from the main headquarters of Microsoft. | |
| | | | | Re: Australia is behind...so is Poland... said by not a real name:
And here I am stuck with iDSL (DSL over IDSN) just outside Seattle, WA, USA not far from the main headquarters of Microsoft.
And you think BPL is going to solver your problems? Think again! Much of the reason you can't get DSL is business related, not because of technical limitations. BPL isn't going to solve that. | |
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| | | "More PLC worries" seem to lump a lot together and over simplify. Would have been far better to narrow it down to the access segment that I must agree is in very serious jeopardy. The in-home segment (aka HomePlug PLC LAN stuff) is still doing fine although somewhat shattered by the access segment shortcomings. | |
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| | | BPL the sad history, the myths and true reality First a little history (those that ignore history get to repeat the mistakes) BPL (AKA PLC/PLT/DPL) is a tired old legacy technology that has struggled with interference issues since it was first rolled out in Manchester, England in 1997 (one year before the introduction of DSL to Europe). Nortel designed the system. The UK authorities tolerated the interference for a time but when the emergency services traced interference to BPL it was shut down.
Development moved to Germany, Nortel struggled on and eventually decided that the interference issues could not be resolved. Siemens then took up the lead, after several thousand customers had been connected up, Siemens came to the same conclusion as Nortel and exited the business. The next company to enter the business was Ascom based in Switzerland. Then an Israeli company called Mainnet entered the BPL market using chips from a Spanish company called DS2.
Tests were made in Japan and the authorities banned BPL due to the interference problems. Next Finland shut down their BPL system due to interference problems.
By 2003 there were 7,000 users in Europe with a multitude of test sites all small scale. BPL customer growth was stagnant.
The U.S. was never considered a market for BPL because of the architecture of the electrical distribution system. In most of Northern Europe electrical distribution is underground with about 200~300 houses for each transformer. In the U.S. much of the electrical distribution is overhead with up to 6 houses sharing a transformer.
In what can only be described as a desperate last ditch attempt to sell product and survive, the BPL industry created a "phantom" product that answered the FCC's need for rural broadband. The myth was propagated that BPL was the answer to rural broadband deployment. The FCC commissioners bought the story, the press talked about Internet at every socket.
The reality is that of all the Internet distribution technologies BPL is the least suited to go any distance. Every 2,000 feet an expensive repeater in needed to boost the signals.
Now to the myths
Clean technology myth
Tales of interference had preceded BPLs arrival, the myth that the interference issue had been solved (first generation problem!) was told to anyone who would listen. The lobbyists were very successful, they managed to get an FCC commissioner to state that the interference complaints were "unsubstantiated". How the interference problem had been solved was not made clear.
The reality is that the interference is even worse than ever, the modulation technique has been changed so that the interference sounds like noise and for many users it will look like a faulty radio issue. Tracking the source and proving the cause will be difficult.
High speed myth
To add speed to the solution for rural broadband was "icing on the cake". To create the illusion of speed, trial/demo systems where set up where four or five users enthused about speeds in the megabit range. BPL is a shared system and real world results with typical economic user numbers are about 250K (Broadband? more like Midband).
In conclusion
The only people who will profit from BPL are the power companies who will roll out niche systems in the few markets where the economics make sense. It will only take a few systems to trash the radio spectrum for a substantial portion of the western hemisphere.
There are many better ways to provide Internet access, when the choices are rated, BPL but any test comes bottom of the list however you make the measurement. | |
| | | Gee where are all the BPL proponets?
Time to close the curtain on BPL folks. It doesn't work and won't play well with others. | |
| | | | In-Home BPL segment advocate My last posting on the BPL story series indicated that the only way the access BPL segment could work was that if these repeaters could be built and deployed cheaply as part of the major distribution network overhaul so that they can turn down the power levels at which they are currently operating. The deployment economics would obviously have to be subsidized and would be a far better way to create employment than building more weaponry and the market needed for it. Considering that all the money has been spent on the militaries, this option is simply out. I also pointed out that these repeaters were total black magic for supporting broadband data rates, latencies, etc... and hence to be on guard for yet an other massive scam.
I still claim that the in-home BPL segment solution is sound as it operates at much lesser power levels and could coexist in the home segment with hams in the 4-21 MHz range. Has the ARRL reissued their position in regards to the in-home segment in light of recent access segment findings??? Were the HomePlug notch filters not set low enough??? I never got any comments on this while all the focus was on the more threatening matter of the BPL access segment.
BTW, anyone familiar with FCC procedures can tell us what and when is the next step for the NOI? No treckie humour or content suggestion to the FCC please. No the recent blackout outage was not caused by a BPL glitch on the access (or in-home) segment. | |
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| | We need forks and stakes! Sheech it a creeping monster that keeps getting killed but keeps coming back!
Everywhere this mess has been deployed it finally killed off due to being impractical. Time to stick a fork in it! Hammer a stake into it. Expose it to sunlight!
Beyond the reason that it does not work to not deploy it. Look at all of the money they will wast on trying to make it work and not improving the powergrid! Also all of the service going mad tracking down the interference etc. | |
| | | Think about Japan, folks. The debate on BPL should have long died when Japan (One of the leaders in the broadband world) decided that BPL was junk. I'm surprised that companies are wasting money behind BPL, when they could use this money for fiber.
Power companies could better spend their money on deploying fiber, using it to acquire customer data (meter readings). Selling broadband internet to customers could be used to defray the cost of the lines. | |
| | | | Re: Think about Japan, folks. said by fifty nine:
The debate on BPL should have long died when Japan (One of the leaders in the broadband world) decided that BPL was junk. I'm surprised that companies are wasting money behind BPL, when they could use this money for fiber.
Power companies could better spend their money on deploying fiber, using it to acquire customer data (meter readings). Selling broadband internet to customers could be used to defray the cost of the lines.
Excellent points, would just like to add one more . . .
Power companies need to focus on keeping the lights on!!!! | |
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| | BPL interference complaint/report Report by Joel Gilly on a BPL "trial system" interference investigation
Joel's report is very detailed I have sniped to save bandwidth.
----- Original Message -----
From: joel gilly
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 11:41 AM
Subject: BPL in Emmaus, PA and My Meeting with Ed Hare.
Gentlemen,
As I had mentioned previously, Ed Hare W1RFI and ARRL Lab Manager, was stopping over in the Lehigh Valley, PA on Wednesday as part of a three state sweep to monitor and collect data about BPL. I had the pleasure of meeting and spending time with Mr. Hare on Wednesday morning and had the opportunity to witness the effects BPL has on the Amateur HF bands.
#snip#
The area in Emmaus that is being used by PPL for the BPL test is in the area of Pine St. just behind Emmaus High School and the East Penn School District Administrative building. We drove around to find a spot were we could setup to do some measurements. Mr. Hare had selected a spot the previous evening that he thought might be a good area to listen to and measure BPL's radio signature. We parked outside a residence and he began setting up his equipment.
Mr. Hare is using a very simple set-up in order to make an estimate of the field strength of signals that he is interested in. Strapped to the back seat of the Subaru was a wooden palette that contained a deep cycle battery, an inverter, a step RF attenuator, an ICOM PCR-1000 receiver, and his laptop computer running custom data acquisition and processing software that Mr. Hare authored. As mentioned before, he used a Buddi-Pole compact loaded dipole mounted in a tripod strapped to the roof rack as the antenna. The measurement process involves using the sound card in the laptop PC as an audio voltmeter.
#snip#
The real eye-opening part of the day was to listen to BPL in action on the HF bands. Mr. Hare disconnected the PCR-1000 and replaced it with a Kenwood TS-440 and we listened to several amateur bands. The type of BPL used in the Emmaus area (there are several "flavors" which Mr. Hare showed later) creates an impulse type noise on the bands. It sounds very much like a Geiger counter. The noise generated is very broad banded and can be heard continuously up-and-down the bands. It seemed to be strongest on 21 MHz and faded below 5 MHz and a little above 24 MHz, but this may have been due to our receive antenna not being optimized for those frequencies. BPL created a consistent S5 to S7 noise level on the bands. We listened for a while to 14.060 Mhz to hear what it would sound like on a popular frequency. Some faint CW stations in the background could be heard, but the opinion was that they would be "un-copyable" under the circumstances.
#snip#
Later, we drove around again to attempt to find a "hot spot". In the areas that had BPL, it was interesting to note the changing profile of the noise as we roved around the area. Every time we passed a utility pole, the noise level peaked dramatically. We arrived at one area that exhibited a significant increase over neighboring areas. This area happened to be a pole that contained a BPL injection point. The noise present at this location was unprecedented. On the Kenwood, I noted a consistent S9 to S9+10 noise level. I tuned up to around 14.200 and found a 5 call area station in QSO with CY9A. The five was copyable, but CY9A was much weaker, and the noise would have rendered a QSO with the station unmanageable. Mr. Hare then disconnected the TS-440 and made some field strength measurements. His measurements revealed field strengths well in excess of FCC limits.
#snip#
Thank you for your time.
Regards,
Joel M. Gilly | |
| | | God Almighty... screw the hams It appears to me that what we have is a club of propeller heads numbering a few thousand at best, who are determined to head off any possible threat to their hobby, despite the far greater benefit that cheap broadband (via competition) would offer far vaster numbers of the public.
For shame gentlemen. | |
| | | | Re: God Almighty... screw the hams So I suppose its OK to screw not just the hams, but also the SW broadcasters, the military, aeronautical and nautical users to name a few more.....?
Over here in the UK, the well known BBC is totally against PLT, and has done numerous studies - both theoretical and practical to show that PLT will bring SW broadcasting to an end in areas served by PLT.
The worst of it is that PLT does nothing that other systems of broadband access cannot. All it really does is to allow another set of players (the electricity suppliers) to get their fingers in the pie.
For shame those who would push an antiquated system on the world just to make some extra profit. | |
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