The people that have to be convinced are the CFO's at the utilities and they
will have to have a very pursuasive reason for scrapping a system that is
already in place and that cost millions. As N2EA and others have pointed
out, once the green eyeshades are on, BPL just doesn't pencil out very well.
Utility middle management will take a good hard look at the actual
installation, training, maintenance, interference mitigation, and management
costs of BPL. That's when its attractiveness should start to fade.
73, Ward N0AX
> 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
>
> > 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
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