March 02, 2004
Broadband over Power Lines Rolled out in Cincinnati
Cinergy today announced that it is concluding a successful trial of providing broadband Internet access via power lines (BPL) to about 100 residential customers and will be, starting today, rolling out the service to about 16,000 homes in Cincinnati, Ohio.
"A unit of Cinergy Corp. today will become the nation's first electric utility to offer high-speed Internet service to customers via its power lines, turning every electrical outlet in homes or offices into a Web connection.The technology, which will be offered first in Hyde Park and Mount Lookout, holds the promise of adding competition and cutting prices for broadband services while making such service available (particularly in remote and rural areas) without costly investments in cables."
The whole story is here...more soon once I've looked into it a bit more. Given that I live in Hyde Park, I expect I'll be investigating this quite closely in the near future.
At first blush, this is pretty exciting! It will definitely put pressure on Time Warner and our local phone company, especially when Cinergy starts offering VOIP phone service too. Things they are a-changin'.
I do wonder what the uplink is. Better uplink means better videoconferencing with friends and family, among many other cool things.
This Scottish site references 1 megabit up & down speeds. http://www.hydro.co.uk/broadband/
Posted by Bob at March 2, 2004 03:28 PMSupposedly they have 1 mbps up AND down for the base rate and faster speeds (just down, I think) for more $/month. Still, 1 mbps up is pretty yummy!
Posted by Craig at March 2, 2004 04:19 PMThis is a subject near and dear to my heart (and we have one patent to prove it!) 1 Mbps is nice, but you ain't seen' nothin' yet.
There are people working on >200 Mbps, shared among 10-20 subscribers per xformer gateway. That's 10-20 Mbps per subscriber, enough for VoIP, streaming video and broadband Internet.
I can't tell you any more than that! :)
Posted by Sam at March 3, 2004 12:00 PMBeing out in the DC burbs, my power provider is Allegheny power. (Allegheny, unlike many power providers in the DC area, does an excellent job with power line maintenance.) They seem to have teamed up with BroadbandNow (bbnow.com their name may have changed to Ygnition) to offer some limited T1 services to apartment complexes and the like. 1.1 Mbit seems like old news.
Any comments from Sam-the-guru?
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