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Fewer Than 5,000 Broadband Over Powerlines Subscribers

from the again:-it's-dead,-jim dept

Thu, May 8th 2008 5:04pm — Mike Masnick

Following the story earlier in the week about the death of broadband over powerlines, Broadband Reports points out that even by the FCC's "stunningly meaningless" broadband stats (that tend to inflate access claims), BPL only has 4,776 subscribers. This for the technology that it declared as "the great broadband hope" five years ago. So, once more, with feeling: broadband over powerlines is dead. It's not a serious option.

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Filed Under: bpl, broadband over powerlines

11 Comments

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some old guy, 8 May 2008 @ 5:30pm

how many zipcodes
how many zipcodes does that cover? remember now, the FCC considers 2 broadband providers in an entire zip code as "competition" for the entire zip code.
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Elohssa, 8 May 2008 @ 5:46pm

I'm no master of the subject, but...
..as a concept, it makes sense, because access to power, phone and water lines is guaranteed by the government in almost every modernized nation. Cable and fiber is not (yet.)

At the same time, the idea of using the self-same lines just sounds dangerous to maintain. Might as well float fiber through the sewers.

Maybe it would be better to guarantee right-of-way access (within reason) to the poles to private companies? They could hang their own gear up there, and then just connect the dots.
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Agonizing Fury, 8 May 2008 @ 5:54pm

Fiber through sewers, what a novel idea...
Your comment reminded me of a great april fools day joke. Sorry about the OT comment, but it was just too funny after that comment. Check out google's Toilet Internet Service Provider:

http://www.google.com/tisp/
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- Anonymous Coward, 8 May 2008 @ 6:17pm
  
  Re: Fiber through sewers, what a novel idea...
  That's just what I thought of too.
  
  If anyone could do it, though, it'd be google.
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Mischa G, 8 May 2008 @ 6:06pm

What kinda power?
See, it's a shame that IP over power lines didn't wok. They shoulda made it IP over power lines delivering power made from cow crap! Then they'd have had a winner.
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Rich Brownlee, 8 May 2008 @ 9:28pm

Broadband Over Powerlines
The reason BPL is not popular is very few of the people in the country are aware of it. Not everybody lives in a large city...u would be surprised of the people who aren't even aware of HDTV! I still have dial-up and am located about 1000 yds. from a broadband area--moving is no option so BPL would be ideal but the bottom line is it would be too much competition for the BIG phone companies.
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- dorpass, 8 May 2008 @ 10:21pm
  
  Re: Broadband Over Powerlines
  Actually no, the reason BPL is not popular is because it is so damn hard to implement and then scale. It serves just fine for slow speed functions (like getting information from power meters) but at high speeds with many users, the noise is just too much.
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  - stationstops, 9 May 2008 @ 9:58pm
    
    Re: Re: Broadband Over Powerlines
    Exactly - make no doubt about it, if BPL was a competitive solution to DSL/Cable someone would have capitalized and marketed it to death a loongg time ago - and everyone *would* know about it - the fact that no one does know about it means there is a reason upstream.
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Anonymous Coward, 8 May 2008 @ 10:44pm

Also (if memory serves) some implementations of broadband over power lines interferes with registered amateur radio frequencies, which would have to be relocated to another part of the spectrum.
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Nasch, 9 May 2008 @ 7:39am

So, why are we still talking about it?
I'm just curious - if it's so dead, why keep reporting on it? I'm not complaining of course, you can write about anything you want.
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bob, 9 May 2008 @ 8:58am

When did someone actually get this working?
The last thing I read was that it still wasn't working and would be ready for the rollout of the next Duke Nukem game.
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