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12Mbps Powerline Broadband Trial Unveiled 316

Posted by Zonk from the sign-up-now-for-this-incredible-tv-offer dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The tiny state of Tasmania in Australia has kicked off the country's first commercial powerline broadband trial. The service is capable of providing Internet connectivity of up to 12Mbps but during trials, it will be limited to 4Mbps. Costs will range from $12 (A$15) to $67 (A$80) per month for speeds between 256Kbps and 4Mbps. Powerline broadband has received wide support from leading vendors including Intel, Motorola and Cisco Systems -- all of whom support an organisation called the HomePlug Powerline Alliance."
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12Mbps Powerline Broadband Trial Unveiled More

12Mbps Powerline Broadband Trial Unveiled

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  • Doesn't this frighten anyone... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Nuclear Elephant ( 700938 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @01:58PM (#13549103) Homepage
    ...that our once thought unfounded fears of someone programming our toaster to eat our dog are not not-so-radical?
    • Offtopic? You pansy. I'm being serious. Once this becomes commonplace, the old sci-fi troll we all thought was stupid and not technically feasable act of hacking into computer systems and messing with people on an entirely spooky level seems pretty doable once this becomes commonplace. How will we know that certain appliances aren't really network conscious? E.g. an override to turn a garbage disposal on remotely while someone's hand happens to be in it, or for the stove to fire up to enormous levels of hea
      • Anyperson with common sense and that reads warnings will see that it says. TURN OFF POWER BEFORE OPENING DEVICE. No matter how smart your garage disposal unit is, if you flick that switch at the wall it CAN NOT DO ANYTHING. As for smart fridges etc. A smart fridge would just report on what is needed for it, like new milk, cheese, juice. In Japan they have smart fridges that order needed goods. Things such as defrost/turn-on.off remain manual operations. The only thing I see smart in a stove we be sensors to
        • No matter how smart your garage disposal unit is

          They say Americans are wasteful, but that's just something else. I wonder what kind of power is required to turn a motor that big? ;)

          if you flick that switch at the wall it CAN NOT DO ANYTHING.

          Have cheesy horror movies about demonically possessed houses or intricate plans of Death taught you NOTHING?! Just flicking the switch is begging for a freak gust of wind, wandering fly or quantum indecision to flip that sucker back on when you are knuckle deep!

          Ah, I
      • Crikey... something like 75 cents of electronics from Radio Shack can build a frequency filter that will suppress frequences above 60Hz, so nothing could connect to the BPL network... you could even put them in your basement right as the electricity comes out of the circuit breakers... Or build a 1:1 transformer with the same filtering characteristics, or use a UPS that draws off of the battery, or... whatever. There are plenty of solutions.

        In fact, this has long been a security issue in HomePlug (which is

      • I'd like to point out that stoves have been blowing up houses for years without any assistance from ethernet.

        Powerline broadband may be widespread in the future, but the cell phone network gets pretty good coverage right now. Your garbage disposal could have a cell phone build into it. Your toaster could be network aware right now. How would you know? Widespread WiFi presents the same problem.

        If someone wants to get you by turning your appliances against you, they can. They don't need powerline bro

  • Reasons to move to Australia: (Score:5, Funny)

    by Elrac ( 314784 ) <carl@smotr i c z . c om> on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @01:58PM (#13549108) Homepage Journal
    • Cheap, fast IP via powerline
    • No hurricanes!

  • Los Angeles (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @01:59PM (#13549118)
    In other news, Los Angeles is working on an implementation of electricity over power lines. Still a few bugs to work out in their implementation though, apparently.

  • State of Tasmania? (Score:5, Funny)

    by drgonzo59 ( 747139 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @01:59PM (#13549121)
    Tasmanian Devil reportedly not impressed. Already using 1GBit fiberoptic connection.

  • RRARGH! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Stanistani ( 808333 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @02:01PM (#13549132) Homepage Journal
    Taz administer broadband network!
    NNNNyehhh, what's up doc?
    Taz eat hacker rabbit!

  • Those MB per month limits are awful (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Shivetya ( 243324 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @02:02PM (#13549154) Homepage Journal
    http://www.tastel.com.au/bpl/price_broadband.html [tastel.com.au]

    I bet I can do that in a day or two just patching a game? Or am I reading it wrong?
  • I thought that HomePlug was using your house's power wiring as a replacement for ethernet, not unlike HomePNA where you piggy back on your existing phone lines for the same purpose.

    Aren't HomePlug and BPL different, or have they merged, or what?

    • Re:Home Plug? (Score:4, Informative)

      by fatboy ( 6851 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @02:16PM (#13549290)
      Homeplug is the consumer standard for in house data over powerlines.

      HomePlug is also the standard that Motorola is using for their low voltage Canopy system. It operates on the 110/220 side of the transformer, not one the medium voltage lines.

      Homeplug has actual hardware based filters to make sure it does not interfere with amateur radio operators. It does not merely change the modulation technique like most BPL providers have done to mitigate interference.
  • I have Comcast cable internet and I'm pretty happy with my download speeds. The thing that I wish they would allow for is higher upload speeds.

    So this new service offers 12Mbps download... but what are the upload speeds?

    • The upload speeds that TasTel (the company that is currently doing this) depend on which "package" the user buys. Here's the relationship:

      256kb/64kb
      1Mb/256kb
      4Mb/1Mb

      So if the user chooses the 256kb down package, they get 64 kb up. There is also a 1Mb down/1Mb up package which is somewhat more expensive then their 1Mb/256Kb package.

      All these details and more can be found at their website: http://www.tastel.com.au/bpl/index.html [tastel.com.au]

    • Another question: how fast is it? "12Mbps" you say? No, that's not how fast it is. That's how "big" the pipe is. What I want to know is: how much latency?

      If this is anything like satelite, I wouldnt go near it even if it did come to the US.

  • Sad... (Score:3, Informative)

    by coop0030 ( 263345 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @02:03PM (#13549172) Homepage
    Powerline broadband has received wide support from leading vendors including Intel, Motorola and Cisco Systems


    It's kind of sad that these companies have so little respect for the Ham Radio operators.

    With all of the evidence showing the damage that the broadband over powerlines causes, this is kind of sad...

    • Re:Sad... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @02:07PM (#13549207) Homepage
      You'd think all the communication problems post-Katrina would have taught people something too. I've heard all sorts of stories of people not being able to communicate, police walkie-talkies being useless after a few hours when the battery dies, etc. Considering hams that prepare for this kind of thing know what they're doing and are supposed to prepare and be ready for having no electricity and such.

      This was a big PR chance. I heard in some areas the ONLY way to get messages passed (especially "Is my brother OK" type Health & Welfare traffic) was by hams.

      • Re:Sad... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by slashname3 ( 739398 )
        When the hurricanes hit last year (direct hits by three of them over about a months time) we found that cell phones failed almost immediately then a few hours after the power went out the land lines failed, their battery backups exhausted.

        We were without power for about a week. During that time the only communications we had were one channel that came in over the rabbit ears on the TV or the radio. The generator and transfer switch I had was able to power much of the house (no A/C) but the cable servic

    • Re:Sad... (Score:3, Informative)

      by doombob ( 717921 )
      Exactly. Look at what the Wireless Institute of Australia has to say about some of this: Official complains and primers on interference. [wia.org.au]
    • Well a Ham in the area has already sent in a complaint. Claims S9 interference on the 80 meter band. Pretty much blanked out HF for him.
      I am all for broadband but giving up HF radio seems like a bad plan.

    • Re:Sad... (Score:2, Informative)

      by MuffinSpawn ( 914643 )
      I'm a Ham and have been keeping up with the test results through QST, a magazine put out to members of the Amateur Radio Relay League (ARRL). The ARRL web site has probably all the info you would want at http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/ [arrl.org].

      I've tried to be objective about the technology, but especially when I see videos of Hams driving around their neighborhoods with an HF rig dialing through the spectrum and hearing nothing but hum from the power lines transfering BPL signals, I can't say I'm very opto
    • It's kind of sad that these companies have so little respect for the Ham Radio operators.

      This is an article from the ARRL webpage discussing some work with Motorola at W1AW:

      BPL at HQ: ARRL Cooperating in BPL System Experiment
      http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2005/08/29/1/?nc= 1 [arrl.org]

      I don't know what the other BPL developers are doing, btw.

      Please cut the whining folks, and read up. I thought that hams were a bit more resiliant than this.

      -Pete Lee
      K7LEE

  • Grr... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    After I spent all this time getting off-grid!

  • power outages (Score:2, Insightful)

    by lonasindi ( 914571 )
    but even with a UPS, you'll no longer be able to surf the 'net if the power grid goes down. The data signal is going through all the same places as the regular power.

    A small price to pay though, does anyone know the maximum range on this technology?
    • I have cable right now, and wouldn't be able to surf if the power went out (even though I have a laptop). Wireless (not 11b, WiMax type) is the only way you can do that, and that assumes that the wireless device (repeater, router, whatever you want to call it) that your computer would connect to still has power (or has a backup).
    • Er, so what? Your UPS won't help if the Telco goes down (DSL), or Cableco (cabelmodem). You can't surf the net if your provider is down, no matter who it is.

      If anything, this saves you the cost of a UPS :)

  • Misleading headline (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Brunellus ( 875635 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @02:07PM (#13549203) Homepage

    c'mon, guys. Is it asking too much to report the ACTUAL bandwidth used in the trial, instead of some arbitrarily-high number that the users involved will never actually see??

  • Just makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Joe Random ( 777564 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @02:07PM (#13549206)
    Broadband over powerlines makes a whole lot of sense. Currently if you want broadband you have to run cable from your local cable provider, phone line from your local phone company, optical fiber from . . . whoever might offer that service (not an option in most areas, including my own, so I'm not sure), or you'll have to set up a satellite dish and worry about weather effects.

    But what's the one thing that all computers have in common? They use electricity! And even if you're generating your own, you're still likely hooked up to the grid so that you can sell your excess back.

    I can definitely see broadband over power lines being a big hit in developing countries, since they won't have to worry about the added infrastructure for connecting their residents to the Internet. Add voice over IP and you end up with VOIPOPL: Three products for the price of one (give or take a bit of added overhead).

    • Re:Just makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @02:10PM (#13549236) Journal
      Too bad it's going to knock out so many communications bands, and that it's going to require major rejigging of power lines, and leaves open the question as to why power companies just don't sling fiber on their poles.
    • The question remains though...What is the range on these systems?

      Powerlines where never designed with having broadband traffic travel through them. They are highly inefficient.

      By the time the signals get to your house in the boondocks the signal must have degraded significantly.

      Once again, Powerlines were never, ever designed with this use in mind. They are terribly inefficient.
      • Powerlines where never designed with having broadband traffic travel through them. They are highly inefficient.

        True. However, DSL seems to work pretty well even if the phone lines it uses were designed for something like 4 kHz of voice bandwidth.

        Of all the non-data cables leading to households, TV cable is the only one that was actually designed for high bandwidth. Pity that the way it is deployed makes it usually worse than DSL.

    • "Broadband over powerlines makes a whole lot of sense."

      It only makes sense when considered in a vacuum.

      Peaceful coexistence with radio frequencies, however, has yet to be demonstrated.

      Consider that you've got RF being transmitted up and down _unshielded_ power lines. Can you say "leakage"? I knew you could. As it stands, the US FCC makes cable TV and broadband providers shit their pants when it comes to leakage, because a certain amount of funding for the FCC comes from fines, and they're not afraid to l
      • Um if you think the FCC is not going to change the rules to allow BPL to emit interference then you are mistaken. There's too much money involved to prevent BPL from proceeding.

  • Paranoia alert... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by zen611 ( 903428 )
    So, any outlet could be an internet connection? I envision web cams and microphones left in every room by your crazy ex-girlfreind... Kind of expensive to have to replace all appliances, electronics, and outlets after an ugly breakup.

  • 400 Mbps! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by op12 ( 830015 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @02:10PM (#13549233) Homepage
    The article alludes several times to the higher possible speeds:

    According to Ehrenfeld, the BPL service will be capable of providing an Internet connection for homes and businesses that is "vastly quicker" than the 24Mbps maximum possible with ADSL2+ technology, which uses analogue telephone lines. Such speeds are so far only being offered by only a couple of ISPs, with several more offering speeds up to 12Mbps.

    But what really caught my eye:

    "engin and Mitsubishi Electric engineers have worked closely together in both Australia and Japan to incorporate engin's VoIP technology in the 200Mbps BPL product developed by Mitsubishi," said a statement from the VoIP vendor on the trial.

  • Clarification of 'tiny' (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Mindwarp ( 15738 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @02:16PM (#13549286) Homepage Journal
    <i>The tiny state of Tasmania</i><br><br>Just to give some idea of what 'tiny' is in this context, Tasmania is about half way between West Virginia and South Carolina in terms of area.
    • Tasmania is looked upon as geographically small by the rest of Australia - Australia is roughly the same size as the US (without Alaska) - but only divided into seven states (or territories).

      Tasmania is by far the smallest state - it is four times smaller then the second smallest state (Victoria) and forty times smaller then the largest (Western Australia)
  • I can hear them now...
    How do I plug in my Powerline BroadBand? Can I surf the web with my monitor? Can this thing run on batteries?

  • Tiny? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gonerill ( 139660 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @02:18PM (#13549304) Homepage
    The tiny state of Tasmania Tasmania is about 68,000 sq km [wikipedia.org] in area, which makes it bigger than West Virginia, Massachussetts, etc. Would you write "The tiny state of New Jersey"?
    • It's all relative. In Australia, Tasmania is considered tiny. In the US, Rhode Island and Hawaii are tiny.
    • It is tiny, one can cross it north to south in 6 hours or so, even dispite its frankly disgraceful road system.

      It is a very nice place though. I'd advise anyone reading this to check it out if they ever feel like seeing Australia. Most tourists like to see stuff like wallabies, koalas, tassie devels and wambats and Tasmania is a great place to see them. Cradle mountain is an especially beautiful place to visit, though it's a little cold.

    • In Australia, Tasmania is considered tiny. Maybe. I'd say the ACT (where Canberra is located) is tiny. Tasmania is just small.

  • Radio Frequency interference (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kb1cvh ( 88565 ) * on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @02:19PM (#13549315) Homepage Journal
    Will this deployment of Broadband over Powerline cause interference to radio services and be subject to interference from radio services ?

    The American Radio Relay league has information on BPL in the USA at

    http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/ [arrl.org]

    The Australian Government has information on BPL at

    http://www.acma.gov.au/ACMAINTER.2490560:STANDARD: 2099729486:pc=PC_2845 [acma.gov.au]
  • I can't wait until the day comes when I can send someone an instant electric shock through the internet.

  • BPL plays hell with radio. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Nethead ( 1563 ) <joe@nethead.com> on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @02:26PM (#13549368) Homepage Journal
    Many, if not all, of the BPL designs that have been deployed to date suffer from a number of technological weaknesses. Perhaps the most critical of these is that BPL is seriously degraded by nearby transmissions from low-powered transmitters from sources like Amateur Radio or CB. In several BPL cities, amateurs have done experimentation that shows that as little as 5 watts of power from a nearby radio transmitter can seriously degrade the performance of BPL. In some cases, the interference logged off a BPL user, requiring a reconnection to the network.

    This fatal flaw will seriously limit the way that BPL can be deployed and will decrease the reliability of a BPL system in any area where it is possible that nearby radio transmitters could be operating. Under the FCC's rules, BPL is an unlicensed device that must accept any interference caused to it by authorized radio services. In the past, and through decades of experience, such interference is rare to other broadband services, such as DSL, cable or satellite. However, in all of the BPL areas tested for susceptibility so far, the unshielded wiring that is used by BPL apparently picks up nearby radio transmitters and overload or otherwise degraded the performance of the system. Although this has been seen at power levels as low as 5 watts from Amateur Radio transmitters, Amateur Radio transmitters can use as much as 1500 watts of power, greatly extending area over which BPL will be unable to tune out these over-the-air signals.

    See the ARRL.org website for more info. http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/ [arrl.org] 73 de W7COM

    • So...

      Combining the two sides that have been presented, BPL breaks amateur radio, but amateur radio breaks BPL back?
    • the unshielded wiring that is used by BPL

      Okay. So how hard is it to add shielding?

      I mean, serious question. It isn't like we'd have to rewrap the entire fifty zillion miles of power lines in the U.S., or anything. Broadband at this point is mostly a "last mile" problem. The only wires you'd have to reshield are those wires in the last mile. Once you've done that, getting lots of fiber or something directly to the NOC is easy.
      • Actually, it would be pretty hard to add shielding to existing power lines. Remember, the lines up on the poles aren't 110/220 house wiring, they're running distribution level voltages, probably 7-15kV. The shield should be a ground potential, so you'll need insulation between the conductor and the shield. Think of insulation thicknesses ~100 greater than for house wiring.

        Which would add greatly to the weight of the line, so they'd have to re-engineer the whole distribution system, pole spacings, guy wire

  • In the US (Score:3, Informative)

    by Baener ( 914641 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @02:27PM (#13549382)
    Brodband over Powerlines has been offered in the Allentown/Bethlehem area of Pennsylvania USA, since 2004 by PPL electric utilities.
  • Does anyone have the pinouts so I can make a NEMA 5-15P [hochien.com] to RJ-45 [a-c-design.com] crossover cable?

    Muhahaha!

    I wonder if I need to use Cat5 cable or lamp wire?...

  • A couple of questions. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Chocolate Teapot ( 639869 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @02:34PM (#13549449) Homepage Journal
    A couple of years ago I did some work for these guys [cogency.com]. Their products were great, but ISTR that only about 6 homeplug devices could be used on a given circuit. OK, things will have moved on a bit in that time, but I wonder what the limit is now. Also, they would not work across a transformer. Correct me if I'm wrong, but where I live every neighbourhood has a step-down transformer to convert the high voltages used to transport electricity over the grid to something that won't fry any poor bugger that gets within a few feet of it.

  • What's the real capacity (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @02:35PM (#13549450)
    How many people share a powerline? More than share my cable loop? How much capacity per subscriber?

  • Hello broadband over power lines, goodbye radio (Score:5, Informative)

    by drwho ( 4190 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @03:06PM (#13549726) Homepage Journal
    Each time there's an article on BPL here on slashdot, I find it neccessary to point out that it is a destructive technology, making HF radio pretty much unusable.

    While you may not think that your neighbor yammering on his CB, or another neighbor listening to broadcast from Radio Swaziland,or listening talk radio on AM broadcast are very important, there are other communications that are also disrupted: HF radio is used by emergency response agencies all over the world. The inadequacy of communications (among other failures of emergency services) was well demonstrated by the recent Hurricane Katrina disaster. BPL will make this worse.

    HF radio, unlike cellular telephones and other centralized radio systems, has the ability to comunicate over long distances without any intermediate infrastructure. The is vital for disaster communications where the infrastructure is overloaded or destroyed.

    Worst hit would be the poorer nations of the world, where telephone service is often unavailable or unreliable, and much of the communication has depended on HF radio. While the interference at a distance will be less, it will still be strong, very easily strong enough to make a weak signal calling for help in Afria disappear in BPL noise generated in Australia or the US.

    It goes both ways: HF radio can also interfere with BPL. I think that, in an area where BPL is interfering with Amateur Radio, that the Amateurs will not hesitate to use more powerful transmitters (if they can afford the electric bill for doing so). These will disrupt BPL, quite easily to the point of being unusable. And I doubt the BPL ISP will let you out of the contract because of such interference! So don't sign up. It's not worth the headache, and the guilt, and angry hams and other angry HF radio users.

  • I don't know if this is the reason for the trial, but Tasmania has only one power company for the whole state (Aurora Energy, or when I worked there.. the Hydro Electric commission). In the 1950's, a forward-thinking premier of the state invested a lot of money into powering the entire state via hydro electricity. Being an island, it's also fully self-contained and I believe generates a fairly hefty surplus each year (or used to..)

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