If you can convince people that BPL transports bits between a power station
and subscriber wall sockets with no installation or setup, then you might as
well throw "unique opportunity to lower electricity rates" onto the pile.
You'd have thought that the internet would make it harder to get away with
big lies, but the opposite seems to be the case.
73,
Dave, AA6YQ
-----Original Message-----
From: rfi-bounces@contesting.com [mailto:rfi-bounces@contesting.com] On
Behalf Of Ward Silver
Sent: Sunday, September 05, 2004 12:22 PM
To: RFI Reflector
Subject: RE: [RFI] ECM...etc.
> Anyway, these devices seem to be controlled by some kind of digital
> link. I assume this is over the air, like a pager transmitter, but it's
> an example of what a household data line could do in the future.
Wireless (UHF, mostly) remote meter reading and load management systems are
already in place now and work well. Look for a tall vertical antenna on top
of a phone pole somewhere in your neighborhood - it's a collinear of some
sort.
Nothing I've seen proposed for BPL as possible utility subscriber
infrastructure requires anything more than a few bytes per transaction and
it's not time-critical. Why would the utilities go through all the trouble
and expense of replacing a functioning system with a hugely expensive
high-bandwidth system for these minimal transactions? The answer is that
they won't because it's a huge waste of money.
Here's an example of a similar system. You would think that to speed up the
transactions, gas stations and the like would be using the latest dial-up
modem technology to get the maximum bits per second. But they're using old
2400 baud modems...why? Because the transactions are so small (hello, card
#, amount, handshake, goodbye), a 2400 baud modem can connect, transfer, and
disconnect while a V.90 50 kbps modem would still be training to get the
maximum data rate.
Utility infrastructure is a many-short-transactions model while the BPL
model is a few-big-transactions model. They don't work the same way. It
would be like using a race car to deliver the mail.
73, Ward N0AX
_______________________________________________
RFI mailing list
RFI@contesting.com http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/rfi
_______________________________________________
RFI mailing list
RFI@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/rfi
|