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HD over your powerlines?

Scott Greczkowski

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Sep 7, 2003
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Boy, wouldnt that be nice??? Would make rearanging rooms a HECK of a lot easier....
 
I've tried streaming HD with Actiontec homeplug extenders as well as setting up a coaxsys broadband network, and neither worked well (dropped frames and inconsistent performance). So instead of messing with powerline tech I just slammed together a gigabit network on-the-cheap (D-Link router and switch; cat6 distribution) and all works great.

I hope they can get the powerline tech right because that would be so much easier, but so far for me (YMMV) its not up-to-par just yet.
 
As an amateur radio operator I would want to see what the spurious emissions look like on this tech. If it causes the same problems (radio interference) as Broadband over Power Line (BPL), then I am dead set against it. If they can put a band-pass filter on the lines to keep it from being a huge transmit antenna then I'm all for it.
 

+1
 
What you are referring to is part of Grid Computing, aka The Grid. It is tied in with the fusion reactor (partical accelerator) that just went online. If or when fusion takes place, a huge amount of data must be recorded. No super computer in existence can record the amount of data that will be generated in a fraction of a second. A group of networked computers could handle the information. The only stumbling block was network speed. The Internet is not fast enough to handle the stream of traffic, but power lines can.

That is a laymen explanation. More technical detail:

Grid.org - Home
Grid Computing Info Centre (GRID Infoware)
http://dsd.lbl.gov/~mrt/papers/FTGCSPaper.pdf
 

Interesting. I know Duke Energy was experimenting with boardband and TV over powerlines in FL. Was wondering what ever happened to it....
 

First generation BPL rollouts gave this technology a bad rap. They tried to use notch filters, post-processing, to remove interfering frequencies. Anyone that has ever worked with filters knows that filters simply attenuate the signal, but don't completely remove it. Later generations based on HomePlug don't have this problem since carriers at interfering frequencies are never generated by the HomePlug processor. They are digitally removed, rather than filtered.
 

Awesome. If that proves true, i'm all for it. I'm not entirely sure that it truly solves the problems with delivering broadband/TV across the wires, but I'm good as long as it is viable tech.