Ameren Leads PLC Charge → Forest For The Trees

I've been following this technology for years. Every now and then some town pops up that starts testing. No final product or service ever evolves from this testing.

The frustrating part is the constant talk about speed comparisons to existing technologies. I have seen quotes from 5X dial up to 100Meg for speeds. That is not the part that I find interesting, speed can always be improved. The interesting part is deployment. If a technology can be developed to "hop" transformers, you can offer broadband to every house in an electrical grid. There is no need to add infrastructure or place gateways.

The number one hold up is transformers. They are extremely noisy. The reason it works better in other countries is the number of transformers they use to deliver the power. Since there are fewer from the generator to the house, less filtering required, less equipment, faster deployment.

When a cost-effective technology is developed to get past transformers, speed will be a secondary concern. Rural areas, like mine would be on board immediately. My choices now are
my current 26.4 connection for $17 / month
$120 / month for 128K IDSL (~5X28.8)
$70 / month + $600 equip for Sat

Not everyone wants to webhost or game. Just a way to use the internet effectively to upgrade software / surf / and email without using a phone line and waiting 15 minutes for a 1 meg download! To succeed in business you need to offer something that is either better than the competition or fills a void. There is a void, and money to be made. Sign me up! 50 bucks per month, Heck yeah!

I am so with you on that NetEffects.
im stuck with 56Kb @ 26.4Kb cause the phone lines are so piss poor...but, we pay ~$40/month to have always on dial-up (no more getting disconnected every few hours)

even worse: this same 26.4K connection is going through a linux router comp to share it between 5 computers. so just downloading a few windows updates could take decades...

you know...I just about puke when i hear these broadband bastards say stuff like 'ohh earthlink is capping my downloads at 250KB again' or 'its nice living in a town where you get 10Mbit/768 for $90/month compared to what a T3 would cost'....f-off. If i could get broadband, I would. it would be nice if i could actually play CS and such games without have 1400 ping. so getting say 192 or even 128k would make all these games playable. hell, 95% of the web pages i go to would load in a few seconds compared to the 30secs to 5 mins i usually wait.