Massive Bandwidth over Powergrids? 111
The LoneSmurf wrote in
to send us a news.com story that talks about soem company's
new technology that they claim will allow gigabits of bandwidth
to any outlet in your home.
The article talks about the skepticism, but there really isn't
much technical stuff in there for us to consider. It sure
would be great, although I'm not holding my breath.
Re:Yuk (Score:1)
Solution: Support Fusion research!
Re:Yuk (Score:1)
Re:Powerline Networking (Score:1)
Attenuation leads to phase distortion.
Phase distortion leads to suffering (at least in Quake).
Re:Yuk (Score:1)
Also as to fusion, someone else mentioned they have almosted reached breakeven: this is not true. Last time I visited the Tokomak in Princeton they had already reached breakeven several times, and that was at least four years ago (don't remember exactly when).
Me.
Re:It's easier in Europe (Score:1)
What I don't understand is what is amazing about this at all. They talk of modifying the "mag field on the electrons". Fine. Then you hit a transformer and this modified magnetic field gets destroyed. So you have to climb ever 4th hydro pole in North America and replace the transformer or modify it so that this magnetic information is somehow passed on to the lower voltage "signal" that goes to the house.
Now, I look out my window now and see Fibre on the pole. So it looks like that we are back to the last mile equation, except that the cable and phone are ahead.
Unless I am missing something and scientists/EE are now able to encode Gigabits of information on electron's magnetic field and then maintain it when the electrons energy is used in a transformer to generate a (2nd, kind of) magnetic field which transfers the energy to the other coil.
My two cents.
Sety anagram@ns.sympatico.ca - forgot pass.
Re:Technically plausable (Score:2)
only planning to cover the distance between the local powerstation and your house. The powerstation would then be connected to the Internet through normal means, making it kind of
your ISP.
Connecting a powerstation to the internet through a special cable is quite cheap, connecting hundreds of appartments using the same technique is not, so there are some great savings to be made.
/Tord
Changing the SHAPE of bandwidth constraints (Score:2)
Bandwidth in ANY medium is intrinsically limited. TANSTAAFL.
Funny, I didn't think it was April any more (Score:5)
If this isn't a hoax - and hyping a technology similar to one that has already been developed and set aside because it falls drastically short of the bandwidth needed to be useful for a large number of connections (MF shows their "head-end" interface connected to a substation - oh, and notice that they don't show their fabulous technology being used for the uplink from there - that's exciting new microwave to the local telco CO)
Really, it's hard to choose what to criticize here: it's all so utterly bilge from end to end.
I give it a 0 on the plausibility scale, and then take some points away for being two months behind its rightful time.
Other Problems. (Score:5)
get me in trouble or not. I think it is common
knowledge but I could be mistaken.
I work for NT and one problem they ran into in the
UK tests of this technology is the fact that any
large metal objects that the power lines were
connected to (i.e. street lights, etc) started
acting like huge radio transmitters, broadcasting
the data everywhere.
Oh great -- high, metered bandwidth! (Score:1)
The reason that I actually look forward to using the phone company's copper, and dread the electric company's copper, is that the former is accustomed (in the US at least) to an all-you-can-eat pricing scheme for local calls. The electric companies would be unlikely to even consider that sort of scheme. I've got a cable modem. If I want ISDN, I know where to find it.
Re:Yuk (Score:1)
eco-friendly phtovoltaic cells are made?"
For a solar power "plant", you can use parabolic mirrors to greatly increase your effective surface area per cell. Not much help for getting off the grid, but it does help solar plants come closer to cost-effectiveness.
Conservation probably holds out the most hope for reducing pollutants. Fluorescent bulbs that are plug-in replacements for incandescents, better insulation, more efficient heating/cooling systems & other appliances, flat panel TVs, etc., all could help to reduce power consumption, both reducing pollution and saving money. Heck, the web could help too, as we could do more online shopping and less driving around for what we need.
Maybe is plausible. (Score:1)
RMI (radio magnetic interference) (Score:2)
You miss the obvious -- that all this excess radiation is going to cause interference all over the place. It's bad enough that a 50/60Hz hum and associated harmonics are always showing up in wires everywhere due to the lack of shielding in powerlines and house wiring, but now you want to spew even more RMI throughout the spectrum with your networking-over-powerlines hack?
Powerlines were never designed to carry bandwidths required for transmitting data signals. As such, they lack fundamental safeguards against RMI such as shielding and are thus unsuitable for data networking.
Re:Your #2 is in fact a fact (Score:1)
Remember that at a few hundred feet, a watt of radio frequency can cause significant interference. My radio knowledge is limited so I can't pull any numbers around to make a case.
Microwaves & green people (Score:1)
Even though there's a big difference in the amount of energy in a microwave station vs. a radio station, the microwave station's signal is much more focused, and could perhaps cause more damage. Enviromentalists are concerned about this very problem re: endangered species of birds who live on military bases that use microwave signaling. (Granting that the birds wouldn't be there in the first place if the bases weren't such good habitat for them, it's still an issue.)
Nobody's too upset about microwaves now because the only ones using them are the military and the phone companies. This may be a different story, though, if everybody and their cousin Earl start putting up towers.
Light dimmer friendly? (Score:2)
At work, we have hundreds of motor controllers up to 500,000 watts that make an oscilloscope on the mains light up due to noise (and that's after the snubbers AND isolation transformers.) So, there might be a problem with communications in many places...
Re:Yea right, and i have a bridge id like to sell (Score:2)
This makes me wonder why consumers just can't use microwaves for high bandwidth transmission. There is a lot of bandwidth and an amazing amount of channels at 2GHz and above.
To minimize cross traffic in high density areas, they are line of sight. Depending on the antenna, they can be sharply focused at a target or in a broad beam.
I have seen X-band door openers for low as $20. Surely, these can cheap enough for consumer use.
For people afraid of microwaves turning people green with colorful cancerous bumps out of your head, just think about the energy level of a 1 watt microwave transmitter that can be used for a computer versus a 100,000 watt radio station transmiter. The telephone company uses microwaves for relay stations, but I doubt they want this to catch on...
Re:UK/Europe (Score:3)
Typical press release (Score:5)
2.5 Gigabit is a long ways away from a 6.5 gigabyte hard drive.
Anyhow, I suppose you could have a high bandwidth transmission over the power lines, even without the high frequencies. Just imagine the transmission as a current loop with the current modulated at extreme levels. Unfortunately, the cost considerations to do this seem very interesting.
It's been tried in Quebec (Score:5)
After a successfull technological trial, they thought they could actually serve the entire province and split off an ISP branch.
However, plans did not go through for a couple of reasons, at that time (this was 5-7 years ago):
a) the transiant background noise would make it impractical for most purposes
b) the CRTC (broadcast gestapo of Canada) did not grant Hydro-Quebec with a permit to broadcast signal, citing unfair advantage.
The second reason would probably be moot today, as their tigh... regulatory board, loosened up a bit in the last couple of years.
Buried power lines (Score:1)
I don't know about the rest of the UK/Europe though.
Re:Buried power lines (Score:1)
Yeah, most of the UK uses buried power lines and so does many european countries.
--
Don't hold your breath... (Score:3)
The main problem with this is that power lines are not nearly as well-balanced as the twisted-pair that feeds your phone. The result is that any signal on them tends to be radiated, and the FCC takes a poor view of this as would any radio users.
Even DSL is a problem in this way - the phone lines were not intended to be used at DSL frequencies and the result is often broadband radio interference where DSL is used. The problem is much worse for power lines.
There's also the problem that the transformers probably won't pass high frequencies too well, and someone will have to put bypass capacitors on every one of them to get the signal around the transformer.
By the way, here in North America we use 60 Hz, while Europeans use 400 Hz. Another poster had that backwards. 400 Hz transformers can be lighter and smaller than 60 Hz ones, but you probably still have a lot of them (even if you don't notice them).
I want switched fiber to the home. Maybe in a decade.
Thanks Bruce Perens
Re:Powerline Networking (Score:3)
Yuk (Score:1)
rid of ugly power lines, not an excuse to keep
them. We're not working fast enough on solar
power alternatives as it is.
Re:Yuk (Score:1)
the money to research solar, we would come up with
better efficiency, enough to make it viable outside of "hot" places. Right now photovoltaics
are only converting around 13% of the sun's energy they receive. With better efficiency, (and better storage, like flywheels instead of batteries) it could be viable anywhere. The problem is the
money for R&D isn't there while conventional fuel prices are cheap.
Although fusion is also a nice alternative too...
Re:Yuk (Score:3)
1 kilowatt is a lot of juice for one square meter... I could get over a hundred of those
on my roof... I could probably power the whole
neighborhood with that kind of power. The max
you could run into a home is 44 kW, given 220 volts with standard 200 amp cable coming in.
And nobody's going to be using 44 kW unless they're growing marijuana in the attic or something.
Of course, 100% efficiency isn't going to happen.
And the ugliest solar panel array I've seen is
still better looking than the powerlines strung
all over the place... maybe it's different in
your town. But newer designs are incorporating
the solar cells into roofing shingles, so they
aren't that bad looking.
And someone mentioned batteries being a disposal
problem- right! Flywheels are the answer, as soon
as they can develop the right composites that
don't explode when they break at 10000 rpms.
Your #2 is in fact a fact (Score:1)
--
Bandpass filter (Score:2)
Now you need to figure out the attenuation problems (high frequency = high attenuation).
--
UK/Europe (Score:2)
Transatlantic links (Score:3)
However, we need cheap high speeds anyway and this is a viable option. Problem is that telco's don't really want this happen as it would ruin their business where they charge people for (previously) limited resource (bandswidth). They should face that in 21st century (which is right behind the corner) bandswidth will be right and not priviledge. The only major difference between humans and other's repsesentative of the Mother Nature is ability to COMMUNICATE EFFECTIVELY.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com [investigatio.com]
How the Tech works. (Score:4)
As I recall they took advantage of the fact that most powercables there run underground, so they are pretty well shielded from the start.
As someone else pointed out, you can't get the signal past the nearest transformer. The point is that most newer transformerstations already have optic fibre installed. Most underground cableinstallations today lay down optic fibre together with the power cables out of foresight.
/olle
Testing it in Italy (Score:1)
"2.5 Gbps != 1Ebps" (Score:1)
I love how the drooling idiots at news.com make the comment that 2.5 Gigabits/s "isn't quite" the same as an Exabit/s. Can you say "understatement"?
Ignoring the fact that an Exabit is one million times larger than a Gigabit, there's also the problem of routing - there isn't a router built that could possibly handle those kinds of speeds. I mean, c'mon, they can't even handle Gbps levels at reasonable cost yet.
Maybe news.com should be renamed "wedontknowwhatweretalkingaboutbutwelltakeyouradv
Powerline Networking (Score:5)
There are a few problems with powerline networking that people have brought up. I'm just a software guy at this company, but I'll try and address some issues that have been brought up here.
1) It can't go over transformers
Well, no. A transformer is the physical limit of any kind of powerline network, since it gibbers up the signal so much. Powerline can be used to distribute broadband once it reaches the home, but it can't carry the signal TO the home.
2) Nearby street lights broadcast the signal
Um... this is just plain silly. But the signal can be snooped by your neighbors who share your transformer. So we encrypt the data. Problem solved.
3) It's too slow
Yes. Our current product only runs at 350K, making it a bad solution for technology shops. It's primarily aimed at the home office or the small office. We don't use it ourselves here at work since we have bigger bandwidth needs than that. But we are going to be releasing a 2 megabit product later this year, and hopefully a 10 megabit product soon. That's nowhere near the gigabit range this company in the article is claiming. Personally, I think it's all hype. They'll milk their shareholders for a year or two, and then call it quits. (Our company, on the other hand, has had a working example of a powerline network on store shelves for a year.)
4) Light dimmers will spike the signal.
A lot of things will cause the network to drop packets. Our current product will detect that and just re-send whatever packets were dropped, same as any other network protocol. Our next product has a lot more redundancy built into it; we send multiple signals at different frequencies, and they don't all get disrupted at once.
5) There is a lot of bandwidth in the power grid that we could be using
Yes. But to send a signal over powerline, you have to send it at such a high frequency to avoid interference over the wire that the signal tends to bleed off. (I don't understand all the physics behind it myself...) Power lines are noisy, but they can carry some signal. They are not practical for connecting a whole city block to the Internet. Powerlines really are not a good solution for getting broadband to your home. But power companies could use other ways to get a broadband signal at least to the transformer and from there pump it into the home with powerline.
6) Star Wars Episode I isn't making any money.
Ha! Star Wars is cleaning up at the box office right now. Where did you read this? CNN or some other similar trash network?
If anyone's interested in checking out our product, we've open sourced our drivers. You can get them at:
http://www.intelogis.com/opensource/
(Render sits back and waits for the flames...)
On *copper* terabit is implausible. (Score:5)
Fiber has the wonderful advantage of being extremely easy to shield. It's a lot harder to do that to electrical cables. Also, the ultimate bandwidth available on fiber and other optical carriers is huge. Electrical systems are much more limited (shielding is difficult, parasitic capacitance and inductance are big problems, and the electrical characteristics of the wire itself get ugly at very high frequencies).
And this isn't about transmitting over something like cable, which is shielded and optimized for data transfer - it's about transmitting over household wiring. Household wiring is unshielded and has very messy geometry. It also has a huge number of devices with wildly varying electrical characteristics hanging off of it. Unless you're working under ideal conditions, trying doing serious data transfer over it would produce a garbled mess.
Phone lines within a house are a bit better, as there's less crud hanging off of them. Shielding still isn't great. 10 megabit has been achieved in commercial products, here.
As far as transmitting high frequency data over a city's power grid, good luck. Reflections, interference, and cross-talk will be nightmares.
We'll need a fiber infrastructure at some point anyways. I say just push for it instead of trying to use existing copper networks.
RFI (Score:1)
The current situation is pretty bad. There is a lot of poorly designed, shielded and maintained electrical/electronic equipment in use.
I hope the FCC and other spectrum management regulatory agencies are keeping an eye on this.
Technically plausable (Score:3)
It should be trivial to harness some of the higher bands for transmitting data. The only problem is that power cables used to transmit the data would probably have to be extensively shielded, as they would become transmitters and receivers, either losing or broadcasting the data signals at points. Normally, as the AC single is just a 60Hz signal, power cables are often just shielded to protect against the elements, not against transmission of signals.
Exobits over power lines?! (Score:4)
While I certainly hope this company's claims are true--I wouldn't mind a gigabit pipe into my home--those promising `virtually unlimited' bandwidth should be viewed with the same skepticism those who promised virtually unlimited energy from a cold cup of water were in the last decade. Let them prove their work--perhaps write an article for a scientific journal detailing their work (they may patent their work if they need to keep it a secret)[1].
Cheers,
Joshua.
[1] This is not intended to be an endorsement of the current patent situation.
Re:Am I just paranoid? (Score:3)
-----BEGIN OFFTOPIC-----
That said, any "Big Brother" organization that wanted to tap into many homes and businesses would logically turn to power lines as a data transmission medium. The trick is to have consumer devices that transmit data without the designers knowing about it (forgetting about the problem with Transformers for the moment). I can think of very few ways that "Big Brother" could surveil so many people in their homes. Other possibilities inlcude the phone network and of course Echelon.
Each of these would require the complicity of many organizations, hardware and software techs/vendors, repair techs, and others. While an automated system, that is not actually connected to the rest of the world, such as Echelon can hear much--complete and total omniscientness(sp? I made this up) is still too manpower intensive and requires too many people who know about it. Remember: The ability to keep a secret is inversly proportional to the number of people who know about it.
The intelligence industry is composed of individuals, just like you and me, they are not perfect and not all-knowing. Infact many are incompetant, good, moral, evil, power-hungry, insecure, long-hair, crew-cut, and have wife, family, sister, father, new Camaro, and are just like you.
-----END OFFTOPIC-----
Re:Funny, I didn't think it was April any more (Score:1)
www.teledesic.com was doing. Oh wait, its
founders include Bill Gates. Eeek. Nice
interesting technology outside that fact,
however.
Current Situation In Europe (esp. Germany) (Score:4)
At the moment they are testing it under real life conditions and get speed at about 1 Mbit/s at the max. Under controlled enviroment they achieve about 2 MBit/s and they're talking about 10 Mbit/s. I don't think they'll get 2 Mbit/s or even 1 Mbit/s for the average user (here in germany about 200 househoulds share a connection to an electric transformator and so share the maximum connection speed. Perhaps you'll get about 256kbit/s at the moment (because at the beginning not so many people use this technology)).
I don't think that at the moment gigabit-speed is realistic because you don't have a controlled enviroment. Every household has extended it's powerline (just thinking about the wires in my student flat....) .
I like to have a high speed internet access in my room (with the digital powerline, adsl...who cares), but while listening to the marketing people at some firms (for example the Bewag, the Berlin Electric Company who is testing the digital powerline) I get a strange feeling. They aren't talking about high speed internet access or an alternativ to access the plain old telephone network. They're talking about new services like securing your home or your car (they want to use devices in the street lights to stay in contact with your car and detect unauthorized movement of it....imagine: someone call's you: your car is stollen, but we already got the thief.....). It sounds a little bit like big brother is watching you to me...
Bye,
Keef (enjoying his 10 Mbit/s Connection over a Laser Link)
Re:Other Problems. (Score:2)
Not sure if this is the same... (Score:2)
Apparently there is a whole mess of EM "space" in electrical power lines that are not used for anything... only a small portion is actually used to carry electricity. So, my cousins' company is developing a way so that Power companies can use that "space" to transmit data about the usage/time etc. Obviously, this is really good for places with very remote communities that you can't get a meter reader to.
They had a two or three provinces in China very interested in the technology...
Anyway, I seem to remember him saying something along the lines that there is a whole lot of bandwidth in the Power Grid that we could be using... it'd be cheap too.;)
Analog vs digital (Score:1)
For example, one way to get around attenuation is to send signals at two frequencies that should attenuate almost identically - then compare the two amplitudes to get your signal, rather than just looking at one of them. If they've got a way to get through transformers (and from their diagrams it looks like they make it all the way from the home through several local transformers to a substation) they've probably figured out something even more subtle...
Re:Technically plausable (Score:1)
Only the drop to the house is normally insulated and only because the wires are twisted. This prevents short circuits. The high voltage lines are not insulated. Insulation costs money and has weight. More weight means more poles/towers. It's much cheaper to just run bare steel cable.
Of course this means that birds with large wing spans (i,e, Eagles, Ospreys) get fried when getting between the high voltage and the tower structure which is grounded.
I would bet that this company runs into the "last mile" problem all companies run into whether they be phone, electric or cable.
Re:Yuk (Score:1)
Efficieny doesn't matter if you're getting more cloudy days than sun days. Even assuming this isn't a problem, I can think of several instances where a power grid is necessary. For example, take a 20 story condo, I'm pretty sure the building is using up more energy than can be produced by solar panels covering the roof of the building.
Re:Funny, I didn't think it was April any more (Score:1)
Funny, Nortel has been doing alot of investigation into this "implausible" technology. Really, this is old news. Not as fast as the article in question claims but very feasable.
Now how about something about broadband wireless networking...that would really be news.
This technology has been around for years. (Score:1)
Connected to pulse radio technology ?? (Score:2)
Measured before on slashdot.org and FreakTech [sunsite.auc.dk]
Maybe they have combined the pulse radio technology in a power grid modem.
The companies claim of gigabit/s is far faster that the europaen experiments, whish have transferee speed around megabit/s.
Knud
Re:We need fiber! (Score:1)
Re:UK/Europe (Score:1)
But when that UK internet transmission first got press, the articles explained that the multitude of transformers in the US meant it wasn't practical there.
So it can't be the same tech (unless this new company is amazingly stupid. .
Wouldn't it be nice if these "General Interest" technology stories had a "Technical information" hyperlink that gave all the nitty gritty instead of making us guess?
Aaron
Re:UK/Europe (Score:2)
a. isn't in use because street lamps tend to transmit the data as radio signals
b. isn't appliacable to the US because the US power network uses ten times as many transformers, and transformers must be routed around, which is not worth it in the US.
Two points to make (Score:1)
1) If they max out single mode fiber at about OC-192 now (realistic - I know about NEC and others with their experimental setups), then how can I get 2.5 gigabits over a crappy piece of a) steel wire rope (high tension lines - self supporting) or b) regular house wiring (usually plastic coated copper)?
2) This sounds a lot like an MLM scam... er program. Like "twisted pair technology" that was supposed to get 10 megabits to a webtv type box over a phone line.
Re:Maybe is plausible. (Score:1)
Re:Yuk (Score:1)
Re:UK/Europe (Score:1)
They're calling it DPL - Digital PowerLine.
They claim that bandwidth will be up to 1Mb, degrading slightly under peak load.. :0)
Now that'd be nice!
Re:Powerline Networking (Score:1)
Re:Your #2 is in fact a fact (Score:1)
I see no reason why a mile-long array of omnidirectional vertical ground-plane antennas (like for example street lights) couldn't carry for at least a hundred miles, depending on frequency. You could easily get a few thousand if it was low enough to go sky-wave.
This is a little scarry (Score:2)
if your AC-NIC fails, and sends that current into your system you're gonna be replacing alot of pieces.
-or worse if it send it out over your LAN.
Re:Technically plausible - NO WAY (Score:1)
Gigabits: no problem (but a big problem when transmitting over powerlines), Terabits: not yet (maybe someday during my lifetime). Exabits: probably not during my lifetime.
Re:Funny, I didn't think it was April any more (Score:1)
>end.
Correct. They claim analog signals have an almost infinite information carrying capacity. Not according to Shannon! There is a limit to the amount of information a channel can carry regardless of the equipment used. A telephone line is actually much better information transmission medium than a power line. I would be surprised if anyone can get more information over a power line than a telephone line. Big wires do not translate into large information capacity.
Re:Exobits over power lines?! (Score:1)
this is why companies like Coca-Cola don't bother patenting their formula's. They rather keep it a secret, and pray that some other company doesn't stumble across their formula.
And Patents do eventually run out... Secrets can only be found.
My old company built a power-line modem (Score:1)
Am I just paranoid? (Score:5)
That new toaster you bought with the cool digital lightness/darkness controller in it... Is it tapped? The element inside could be adapted into a crude microphone, picking up conversations and feeding them to voice recognition Automata in the controller. The controller could screen for potentially illicit keywords, like "Bomb" or "Tinky-Winky". The conversation could then be broadcast to an Echelon archiving site through the local power grid.
And why not a toaster? In every civilized nation on the planet, the truly important conversations happen in the kitchen. The reason is simple, really - that's where the food is.
Unplug your toaster NOW!
=)
If you think this (my sense of humor) is disturbing, think about how easy this would be to implement.
Re:Photovoltaics (Score:2)
A demo house in the UK (not known for its sunny days) which has produced 50% more electricity than it has used.
http://www.pv.unsw.edu.au/
World record holders for PV cell efficiency - 25%
Generally the idea is that you remain connected to the grid and any excess energy produced (like during the day when you are at work and dont use lights or the TV etc) gets fed into the grid for 'storage' (actually used at places that need it) and then you suck it back out at night when you are at home and you need it. This means that power stations don't need to be as big and are mainly there to handle the peaks and the off hours.
Of course, having an energy efficient building and appliances goes a long way to help.
And PV cells just need light to operate - so even when it is cloudy, they are still generating, just not as much as with direct sunlight.
.
It's easier in Europe (Score:4)
Re:Yuk (Score:1)
I'm looking forward to the propane or natural gas powered fuel cells that are supposed to start hitting the home market next year. Forget clunky diesel backup generators, forget ugly power lines, just a big natural gas connection
Arithon
"Jim: I hate my life.
Gonzo: I hate your life, too.
Rizzo: If I had a life, I'd hate it."
-- Muppet Treasure Island
Re:It's been tried in Quebec (Score:1)
Allot of good projects like the one from Hydro-quebec, have been thrown into the gutter because of the CRTC.
One good point is that they decided not to put there fat stubby fingers into internet legislation.
Re:Yuk (Score:1)
"People do not eat at once for all time, even when they eat a good deal."
-- Planchet
Re:Bypass caps (Score:1)
There is a lot of money to be saved by installing these everywhere, the power companies can then start installing new electronic meters which send usage information back to a collection point for automated billing. If it saves having to send a meter reader around every two months, the boxes pay for themselves in about a year.
Of course, once you decide to install bandpass filters for
In Europe the meters use 1.7 MHz and maybe 8 MHz to communicate back to collection points. It is done with a polling system, which sends a request down the lines, and reads the response from the meter. Every meter has a unique ID, like a MAC address. The companies can also send information about billing rates to smart meters, because electricity at night is cheaper than at peak hours during the day. I used to live in a place which would only heat the water during cheap hours, and shut off most electicity during expensive hours. The smart meter had a little LCD display showing the next few days expensive and cheap hours, so you could plan accordingly.
The FCC has licensed a couple of frequencies for use on power lines, 200KHz and something higher.
BTW, european electricity uses 50Hz, not 400Hz. Airplanes use 400Hz for efficiency and lighter transformers.
the AntiCypher
Re:Power Grid Bandwidth = 200KHz to ~8MHz (Score:1)
Electric companies are installing these all over the place, and installing Automatic Meter Reading meters whenever possible. It saves on sending out meter readers every month or two. My meter is one of those, kinda cool, with a little LCD readout. I miss the spinning disks, tho.
Re:Other Problems. [hoax] (Score:3)
But the hoax was based on some legitimate concerns about re-radiating your private information along all the power lines to the sub-station, which NorTel couldn't answer.
I've got to go post a top-level comment on this...
Exists already for several decades (Score:4)
The places where I am familiar with the technology the electric companies have had to place small bypass filters at each transformer and switching station, but the costs are small compared to the cost of sending a live person around every few months.
I've seen the signals on 8.something MHz, as well as 1.7 MHz. Every meter has a unique identifier similar to a MAC address on an ethernet card, and gets polled on a regular basis. This also allows the company to detect fraud and out-of-bounds usage on a near real-time basis.
The machines which collect the data are typically located in sub-stations which supply 10,000 to 35,000 customers. They can poll each customer in a sub-zone about once every 2 days, and its a continuous process. They are small unix minis, some new ones use NT, and they feed the data directly to the billing center.
If you poke around on the web, you will find that some German hacking groups have documented the protocol used, its pretty simple. Haven't heard of anyone inserting their own information back onto the line or causing DoS attacks. I would expect the companies that make these products also have a web presence.
the AntiCypher
Exobits (exabits?) over powerlines? Hmmm. (Score:5)
The biggest problem with the NorTel experiment in England was that power lines are almost never twisted, just straight parallel wires. Even though the transmission used a highly redundant coding scheme of something like 17 of 5 bits (85% of the information is redundancy, 15% is the actual transmission rate), there was problems of noise and crosstalk. Then there was still problems with putting enough power into the return signal to get it back to a sub-station intact. When they did that, the signal was detectable at every other power outlet on the sub-grid. There was a good media hack done in England which put egg on the faces of the NorTel team, since they couldn't clearly deny the charges of radiating peoples private data all over a region.
So where do you put your firewall when every one of your outlets is an internet connection? What's to stop a blackhat from plugging into an outdoor light socket and cracking every house on the block? Sounds like a whole new field of hacking/cracking just waiting to be exploited.
But then, maybe everyone should just be using fully encrypted and authenticated IPv6 between every device in their house.
Re:Yuk (Score:1)
Besides, there's one cool thing : surgenerator. Those plants make energy out of nuclear waste. Except those stupid French ecologist stopped SuperPhoenix last year
Re:UK/Europe (Score:2)
Optoisolation (Score:2)
User bandwidth / Inter-ISP bandwidth (Score:1)
Power Grid Bandwidth = ZERO (Score:5)
Ya know, i was thinking about this yesterday... (Score:1)
and lo and behold, it's on Slashdot the next day! talk about news for nerds...
Re:Technically plausable (Score:2)
the digital part of the signal and tap in to
what's being transmitted. It's trivial
to come up with a receiver to do this. Another
technical problem is transformers: they have
to come up with a way to pass the network signals
past each and every transformer; otherwise the
transformers will simply absorb the high frequency
signals and not pass them on.
The BIG problem with this (Score:1)
Thats why Im still on the old 56k.