On Tue, 27 Apr 2004 12:37:23 -0400, Minnie Bannister
wrote:

|Yes, the technical standards need to be changed to allow BPL: require
|all power lines to be shielded.

The ones under ground and under water already are.

The problem will be when every house in your neighborhood is a big
#&%*(*& radiator. Or even worse when your KW wipes out the entire
Internet service in a few square miles.

I'm a rural customer of an electric cooperative. (I happen to use
them for my dialup ISP also)

A couple of years ago when I was having a bout of power line
interference I happened to talk to their VP for new technology,
engineer to engineer.

Among other things he told me that reading meters was a big expense
since their service area is huge, covering good parts of three
counties, one of which is the size of Connecticut. They (we, I'm a
part owner) have 29,000 customers and 2,400 miles of lines.

So they (we) tried a system of reading the meters remotely, using
(very) slow-speed data on the power lines. They couldn't even solve
the technical challenges of doing this and wound up changing out most
of the meters to ones with built in transmitters that can be
interrogated by a guy driving around in a pickup truck.

If they can't read my meter remotely how in the hell are they going to
supply me with high-speed data transmission? BTW, I've strongly
suggested that they don't try.