IBM Bringing Powerline Broadband Back?

KindMind writes "IBM, in partnership with International Broadband Electric Communications, appears to be bringing back powerline broadband back from the dead. This time, the idea is to build out in rural areas not currently serviced by broadband, and isn't for competing with other broadband solutions. From the article: 'Their strategy is to sign up electric cooperatives that provide power to sparsely populated areas across the eastern United States. Rather than compete toe-to-toe with large, entrenched cable or DSL providers, IBEC is looking for customers that have been largely left out of the shift to high-speed Internet.'"

Elusive market.

This will also capture the market on all those people who live too far from any hub to get DSL and have free/stolen cable so can't get that!

Re:Elusive market.

Is that some anecdotal evidence? I LOVE anecdotal evidence!

Why others failed

I don't know for sure, but it strikes me that having a big tech player like IBM behind it will make it a lot more likely to succeed. And yes, it's very much needed -- much of rural North America (I'd guess somewhat over half the total land mass outside of metro areas) has no practical broadband available, and no hope of ever being in range of cable, DSL, or even fixed wireless.

Re:Why others failed

So then why are they in range of power? It seems like certain things only happen when they are mandated to be so, like electricity.

Re:Why others failed

In short, power is easy to send over Very Long Distances without making it useless. High speed data is harder to send over long distances.

High speed data over copper wire has really rotten distance limits. Gigabit Ethernet reaches only 300 feet, officially. DSL systems get unhappy after 18,000 feet and stop working at all much past 22,000 feet. That's just about 4 miles from the starting point, and not in a straight line. The wire distance includes any ups and downs or detours the poles take.

Compare that to traditional phone service which can go 5-8 miles on a wire, or power lines that can go 10+ miles. Fiber optic can compete with that, but it's costly both for installation and the electronics at each end.

Re:Why others failed

In short, power is easy to send over Very Long Distances without making it useless. High speed data is harder to send over long distances.
ROFL

Afaict to get power more than a kilometer or so without crippling losses or insane cable costs you have to run at voltages in the kilovolts, that means either very heavilly insulated cables or tall poles with ceramic insulators on them holding bare wires then lots of small transformers dotted arround (more in the US than europe because the US uses a lower voltage for final distribution to properties)

Data could easilly use a similar system. You install a box that is designed to be pole or outdoor cabinet mounted that terminates a fiber run and distributes services to local houses over DSL.

The trouble is the incumbent telcos can't be bothered doing this because there isn't much money in it and when some locals want to do it theselves they can have problems working with the telco to use the final distribution subloops

take a look at http://www.rric.net/ [rric.net] , a lot of the detail seems to have dissapeared now but IIRC they started off using SDSL over dedicated distribution subloops, then qwest tripled the price of those so they had little choice but to move to shared distrbution subloops (requiring complete new equipment), then iirc qwest for a while took away the ability for them to provision new shared subloops forcing them back to dedicated subloops. I consider that some serious messing arround.

Re:Why others failed

Electricity and basic phone lines have been in most of the American hinterland for decades -- tho there are parts of Montana that got power in my lifetime, and still lack phone service. Some parts of California still lack both. But overall, power and phone lines are reasonably ubiquitous.

However -- being in range of DSL is not. Rural phone lines won't support it, being many miles too far from the stations (range limit: about 3 miles). Cable has even less rural penetration. Fixed wireless/highspeed cellphone access is purely line of sight, which leaves much of the mountain west right out. Satellite is pricey and to my understanding, still not wholly practical.

Thus there are still big swaths of American where power-line access may be the most practical route; indeed, it may be the ONLY route for broadband of any sort.

I'm less than 50 miles from Los Angeles and 15 miles from a half-million pop suburb, yet I'm in an area that can't get DSL or cable (in fact I can't get better than 26k on POTS). Two years ago fixed wireless became available here.. but if my house was 50 feet further west, I'd be out of the necessary line of sight. This situation is a great deal more common than urban/suburban folk realise.

Re:Why others failed

When I lived in anaheim, just a mile and a half from disneyland, we were unable to get DSL. Apartments across the street were able to get it, but we weren't.

People can say all they want about government screwing things up when the run them, but fed/state/local govs would do a hell of a lot better getting broadband to the masses.

Re:Why others failed

All of the other efforts failed because it caused interference to ham radios and to emergency broadcast channels.

It had nothing to do with lack of backing, and large corporate backing doesn't necessarily translate to instant success.

Re:Why others failed

IBM on board is indeed a big shot in the arm, however not as big a shot as say if Cisco threw its weight behind it. It would be nice to see the major network guys get into this, and not just Cisco but also NetGear, D-Link etc

I would like to see that happen in Australia too. Telstra have had too much of a monopoly on infastructure for too long and they always leave out rural areas. Sure they have their new 3G network but they overcharge to the point people working in small towns (who dont make as much money as city folk) cant afford it.

Hmm.

I hope that the swaths of America that have sucktastic access to conventional infrastructure weren't planning on using ham radio for anything...

Re:

Almost all of my Ham friends simply detest the idea of BPL because of the interference it gives. Its not just us hams that get hurt by this but other commercial and government frequencies that are in the lower range. If they would spend the money to properly shield the electrical lines to remove interference then I'd love to have BPL.

Re:

the FCC is effectively denying Americans the right to hear news and ideas from other countries.

Sure, because, it's not like internet access is useful for that, or anything.

Re:Hmm.

Internet access can be very easily filtered. HF, not so easy.

Although, Broadband-over-Powerlines seems to solve both problems. Put the communications over an easily controlled technology, while simultaneously "jamming" a not-so-easily controlled one.

Recently declared extra-dead?

Techdirt [techdirt.com] recently asked if we could finally declare BPL officially dead. I guess not!

There was great concern in the radio control modeling community about potential interference from BPL. In fact, a significant amount of fields are underneath or near these powerlines in the "wasted" space where no one wants to build houses. I recall in 2004 or so there being significant email/forum traffic, particularly from those clubs with sites very close to powerlines or from RC Glider pilots that fly long distances from view, toward the horizon, where planes are susceptible to inteference. It was predicted that there was plenty of potential for concern.

Apparently with the concept dying off, so did the concern from RC pilots. I found a post as recently as 2006 where there was found to be little cause for concern (gmarc.com [gmarc.com]) using a spread spectrum analyzer.

Re:

Sorry to break it to you, but more geeks (or hell, people in general) care about internet coverage than those who fly radio controlled devices... under powerlines.

Technical problems still exist, why not WiMax?

Some of the powerline broadband manufacturers were able to produce systems that didn't interfere with public safety and amateur radio.

This is necessary, since even a distant powerline broadband system can interfere with emergency communications - the signals skip off the ionosphere and around the whole world, and sometimes contacts by legitimate radio operators can be made at astonishingly low power - meaning that the power line carriers probably have the potential for worldwide interference.

Earlier this year, ARRL won a suit against FCC that will lead to more realistic parameters for interference. The previous ones applied a single-point interference specification made for consumer electronic devices to any point on a wire, and of course over the total length of the wire the interference power was much higher than the spec.

The problem is that power lines are not like telephone lines or coaxial cable. Telephone lines are carefully balanced so that they cancel out much of the interference they would otherwise generate. Coaxial cables have their own shield. Power lines are driven in unbalanced mode when RF is injected into them, and thus act just like long antenna wires, and they radiate a great deal of any RF sent down them. No amount of signal processing can fix that.

Why not use WiMax? It's higher bandwidth, requires less infrastructure overall to install (since you don't have to bypass transformers, etc.) and works for mobiles. Pretty much every business that has invested in BPL for home internet delivery has failed.

The broadband competition in those areas will end up being between WiMax and cellular.

Bruce

Re:

You probably have some implementation issues there, that sounds so short that I'm tempted to ask if you might really be using wifi. Sure, lots of materials attenuate. Latency? I can't believe it would be worse with WiMax than BPL. BPL is generally implemented as one big bus containing the entire network, while with wifi or wimax you can implement cells.

Power line ISP?

Okay, there's two problems with this, there always have been, and they still aren't practical to solve. The first is transformers. The second is interference.

Transformers: They have a resonant coupling frequency. Try to pass high frequency RF through a power conversion transformer and you get scrambled eggs on the other side. So at every point along the line where you meet a transformer, you'll need an RF pass-thru. These aren't cheap; They need to be lightning resistant, fail safe no matter what (otherwise people die -- no joke here), and in general very well designed. A typical loop is going to see maybe 2-4 step-downs from the plant to your house. At least one RF bypass will need to be installed for each customer, along with whatever CPE is required to get the signal.

Interference: High frequency RF tends to degrade quickly. And above 800 MHz (someone who's an EE, correct me if I'm wrong on the threshold for skin effect) it won't even "stick" to the lines. Because these lines are unshielded aerial lines running in one direction for miles, they make awesome antennas. Which would be great, except... FCC regulations dictate no harmful interference. So any signal being sent down those lines is going to have to be very low power to avoid becoming an omelette with another signal... like say, emergency services. Shannon's law people -- you've got 800 MHz to deal with, a low power signal, and it needs to travel along an antenna some tens of miles along, sucking up every stray RF in the neighborhood. Can you say signal degregation? Any signal you push over that line had better have a helluva lot of error correction. Given it tops out at 3 megabits per second, on a shared link... with 800 MHz of bandwidth to work with... That should give you an idea of just how much the Suck factor is (Low Q for you techies)

So, great article, I applaud IBM for making the effort, but unless you've got some really nifty new electronics, like a DSP from hell, I don't see this being anything but a money sinkhole. Comcast may suck, but they've got a few gigahertz to work with and no FCC restrictions... Just really bad management, which is the only thing making this even remotely practical.

Re:

Any signal you push over that line had better have a helluva lot of error correction. Given it tops out at 3 megabits per second, on a shared link... with 800 MHz of bandwidth to work with... That should give you an idea of just how much the Suck factor is (Low Q for you techies)

If it ends up being cheaper than satellite and faster than dial-up, it'll be a winner in various underserved parts of the country.

Re:

When would I profit though?

BPL=DOA

I am an amateur radio operator, so I've heard a lot of pros and cons against BPL. Aside from the obvious and well worn HF interference issue, it was my understanding that BPL actually isn't great for rural areas because the distances over which it will work well are way too small. In other words, it needs a fiber connection to feed the powerline grid for a small area. Each area of distribution has to be fed by another fiber run. Seems to me like WiFi or WiMax are much better alternatives for rural areas. And what about the new whitespace frequencies that the FCC recently approved? Wouldn't this make wireless even more attractive?

Great!!!!!

Now I can control my wife's electric "back massager" when I'm away!

Re:BuLlShIt

Its really true. After all amateur radio has really changed the world. After the great HAM radio tech bubble where billions of dollars dumped into "vacuum tube valley", things settled down and REAL change began to happen. Dubbed "HAM 2.0", this is when businesses really began to come on line and change the way commerce works. No longer are orders sent via tedious "snail mail" or fax machine - instead operators fire up their radio, dial the frequency of their business partner, and wait for them to respond. Revolutionary!

Now, as the technology has matured, a new generation (dubbed "Generation HAM") has grown up using the technology, and couldn't imagine doing without. Over 1 billion people planet wide use HAM radio every day! Imagine that!

Re:

Sooo ... you look forward to "getting away from it all" by going to your cabin in the wilderness and surfing the internet? Couldn't you pull the shade on your condo, pop open a new pine scented air freshener, and do the same thing from the convenience of your current location? Pardon me for pointing this out, but your argument isn't compelling.