Michael Coslo wrote:


BPL was an attempt by economic interests to turn technical reality
aside for pecuniary reasons, but it looks like th elicensed services
are going to win that war now also.

BPL is going to die because the electric utility companies are not
seeing any revenue from the exercise, are getting some really bad
press, and really don't need the hassle. The interference issue gets
the press, but the decisions are always made on the basis of dollars.

BPL proponents allowed people to believe that they were going to just
send the signals along the lines from some sort of "head end" site, and
they would be there for the tapping. In fact, they were a last mile
solution the Fiber would have to be run almost to the house, then the
signal injected into a H-V line - the bpl signals could not survive
going through transformers - finally a device to couple the BPL signal
from the HV to the Household line after the transformer would allow the
signal into the house.

That's bad technology on so many levels it's obvious that the decisions
were based on economics and perhaps some politics (not R vs D, but the
idea that belief trumps science, that the intuitive idea of sending
multiple signals on one wire just has to work.

Are we going to bet our life on that H-V line isolator - injector never
failing closed, and allowing Several KV into our home electrical system?

But the final issue for me was that the source of the data signal had to
come almost to my house. Clean, yummy, digital goodness being degraded
to a shaky easy to disrupt DSL speed signal. No thanks, folks. But let's
talk about get me hooked directly into that fiber, pleeze!


I've always thought that BPL was a solution to getting metering and rate
data to and from the household from the head end. A fairly low rate
application. This has great value to the regulated side of the utility
(smart grid, before it was known as such). The idea that it could be
used for consumer data was probably promulgated by folks who wanted to
sell bigger/better modems, and latch onto "let's wire america" kinds of
funding. Especially if the unregulated side could get income from
infrastructure installed by the regulated side.