60% of Rural Users Get 3 Mbps or Less > BPL to the rescue

BPL to the rescue

BPL is a dead end tech. Power Lines were never designed to be used to carry broadband. Caused to much interference to be used. The smaller telcos and coops have it right, string fiber to the premise and be done with it. Combine this with Fixed Wimax and LTE with decent data caps and we can serve the un served areas.

Incorrect BPL is in use in places all around the world. South Africa being one of them, Speeds are up to 30mbps in Pretoria.

While the DS2 hardware is fair, the DefiDev hardware is much better.

Too bad that, in many areas, utilities are disallowed from building broadband networks atop their infrastructure.

Ahem, Texas...

reply to ctceo
As an HF Radio (shortwave) user, I am glad that BPL did not gain traction in the US. There is so many existing sources for noise, adding the additional interference from BPL would just make things worse. The Military, Commercial Air Traffic, and Marine folks use HF very heavily. It is often for life and limb. HF is the only method of communication that can reach around the earth without any other equipment other than the transmitter and the receiver. Very very important to many people...
my $.02
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There are 10 types of people. Those who can read Binary and those who cannot.

reply to iansltx
I know, they should disallow any proprietary communication on airplanes as well. While they're at it they should disallow food on planes as well it makes people fatter and could interfere with the balance of the payload.

Wait...what?

Don't worry about the food on planes thing...TX is home to Southwest. Peanuts for flights, though flights can no longer be had for peanuts.

Agreed, BPL however can be had for peanuts to rural markets and this is what major ISP's are afraid of.

...and that magically makes interference issues go away?

I've actually thought about contacting the local utility co-op and seeing how much it would cost, in pole rights, to roll out fiber along their power lines, for areas that have aerial wires. To save weight, a PON system could be used, with taps at every house and enough margin in the system to add capacity, should it be needed (for example by dedicating a couple fiber pairs to backhauling future PONs).

The catch here is figuring out where to get a satellite-competitive TV service from to deliver over the network to aid profitability. Because $70 per month ARPU ($50 for broadband, $30 for voice, -$10 for a bundle discount) probably isn't gonna pay off all that infrastructure.

reply to iansltx

reply to ctceo

reply to ctceo
BPL in other countries may be doable, BPL in the US is not. A lot of our powerlines have very little (or even no) shielding. We've tried it and failed. Power over unshielded lines causes massive amounts of interference (it's physics, not politics.) In adddition, power companies can't get the kind of margins they need to make up the cost of deployment. (politics, not physics.) In some cases we are talking 100 miles (160+ kilometers) just to service 2-5 households.

reply to ctceo
As Eek2121 mentioned, the question lies in whether power lines elsewhere, where BPL works, are shielded? 'cuz in the US they tend not to be.

As for fiber costs, media converters are cheap. PON gear is more expensive but not prohibitively so. Otherwise EPB wouldn't have done what it did.

reply to motorola870
Not sure what Charter's improvements have to do with anything, though I'm happy for their customers in those areas.

The utility-owned cable co-op is a bit more interesting though. How is ownership broken down? Maybe I'm more fuzzy on my anti-muni-broadband law book than I thought.

Interesting. Guess they had the cable system online long before regulations outlawed it. I think Fredericksburg was going to do something similar as a public-private partnership with what is now part of Windstream, but then Time Warner Cable decided that it wanted to nip that sort of thing in the bud...and now muni Internet to residences (or anything from a utility other than dark fiber) can't exist.

reply to backfeed