Anyone else have Broadband over Power Lines (BPL)?

[kostby]

My local utility recently began rolling out BPL - Broadband internet connection over household Power Lines. The concept is pretty simple: an internet connection over the household powerlines.You plug a 'BPL modem' into any 115v outlet in your house, and the other end has an RJ-45 so you use a traditional LAN cable to attach your computer, router, or wireless network hub, and so on.They offer two speeds 384K up and downlink for $20/month or 1.5Mb up and downlink for $30/month.The 'modem' is offered for sale for $150.00. Purchasing a 'BPL modem' gives you an $8 discount per month from the above rates.They're offering a 30-day free trial, and I accepted about three weeks ago.After two-weeks of uninterrupted problems, it was so unreliable that I returned the unit, with a log of each attempted connection, and the results.They think they've fixed the problems now, and I'm trying it again. This time it seems to work substantially as advertised. Here's a link to the hardware manufacturer involved --> http://www.mainnet-plc.com/mainnet/home/

[northvibe]

I heard about this but havent had any experience. In Eletronics class and signals and systems I talked about it with my prof's. There is so much open bandwidth now on lines (phone, power) and the new signals we send are no where near as large amplitude wise as the old signals so theres more bandwidth available that they now can start doing this at diff phases etc so it doesnt interrupt any other signals in the line. My one prof was working on getting 40GBps out of a fiber optic line...where right now we are at 10GBps, using a crystal to spread the colors in the fiber so theres more signals at diff frequencies. its crazy.

[vibe-04]

Hey Northvibe, "signal and systems" humm, sounds like an engineering class I took.Bandwidth is availble but I'm always concerned how a BPL systems stand up to security issues such as packet sniffers. So much traffic is clear text that the potential is there to capture password or sensitive data. I've been wanting to experiment with trapping traffic on my street (cable) but I'm worried the authorities might misintrepret my curiosity. Heck I can interrogate so many open Wifi nodes around here with routers with default password and computer with kids names for passwords, it really doesn't matter.Back to your situation, is BPL cheaper than ADSL/DSL/cable? Also, BPL "might" have signal degredation during weather events.Andrew

[ColonelPanic]

Ugh, BPL. I've heard of it alright. As an amateur radio operator, its development and use concerns me for its pollution of the radio spectrum. http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/It sounds good in theory, plenty of infrastructure in place so it would be dirt cheap to send it out to everybody in town. But it will end up causing issues with radio communications of many types as well as that whole security thing - that's scary. Leaves things wide open for those with bad intentions to see and use.