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

Alan AB2OS


On 04/27/04 10:07 am KØHB put fingers to keyboard and launched the
following message into cyberspace:

The following is from the President's speech in Minneapolis on
April 26, 2004. Note the last line of paragraph four.
Particularly note the comment "(s)o technical standards need to
be changed to encourage that."

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.

Wes Stewart wrote:
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.

I've done the same with our cooperative here.

Personally, I think attempts to fight BPL through the political system
are a waste of time. The amateur radio community doesn't have the
financial resources to outbid the utilities for legislation.

What *will* stop BPL is economics.

Many of the expenses of offering broadband communications are
independent of transmission technology. Obtaining a backbone
connection, providing mail & web servers, customer support & billing are
all expenses that are the same whether you're providing BPL, DSL, or
cable modem service.

BPL has the additional disadvantage of requiring well-trained personnel
with expensive safety gear to maintain the infrastructure. Most cable
and DSL maintenance can be done on the ground.

BPL is at an advantage ONLY in very rural places, too small for cable
and too far from the CO for DSL. Such places don't have enough
customers to pay for the fixed infrastructure.

IMHO a few utilities will try full-scale rollouts of BPL - and will find
it doesn't sell enough to pay the expenses. It'll go the way of the
picturephone.

=============

If that doesn't work, we can tell the freeband community what's wiping
out 26-29MHz, and post a few photos of the BPL access equipment, and
then be sure to not get anywhere near a power pole without a bulletproof
vestgrin...

--
Doug Smith W9WI
Pleasant View (Nashville), TN EM66
http://www.w9wi.com

"Wes Stewart" wrote in message
news
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.


Tell me about it. Another thing that hasn't been considered is the
condition of these lines. I have been fighting for 5 years here in Alabama
to get the 20/9 noise level (at times past) fixed. Two years of that was
educating the fools what to do about it.

Can you imagine how much trouble its going to be getting BPL through that
noise?

Dan/W4NTI