Broadband-over-Powerline Experiences?

tarp asks: "I'm moving to the City of Manassas, Virginia, where ZPlug offers BPL (Broadband over Power Lines). The city was the first in the nation to offer BPL as an alternative to DSL or Cable. They claim a 300 to 500 kilobit per second connection speed, and rock-solid performance since the only downtime would be when the power grid goes down. BPL is also rolling out in other locations, despite campaigns by amateur radio enthusiasts to stop it due to interference. Anyway, have any of you used BPL, and is it something I should try rather than getting a DSL or Cable connection?"

Reliability? yeah right...

[pio!pio!]

It's not only when the power lines go down..but when their servers fail. They lull you into a sense of security because you think "oh it should never go down because my power never goes down"

Plus it's relatively new technology. I bet there will be horrible times if you ever need to call tech support.

Bleeding Edge

[rhettoric]

"If you're not on the edge you're taking up too much space!"

That might be applicable for surfing, but anyone who has is a chronic early-adopter has been burned by New-Amazing-Technology(tm) time and time again (My father is one of these, he's purchased betamax machines, laserdisc players, Newtons, eBooks, etc.).

Unless there is a truly compelling reason to go with the new, different technology (i.e. it's either this or 56k, or its marginally cheaper), stick with what works.

I would write more, but my Commodore-64 is acting up.

Re:Reliability? yeah right...

[mark_lybarger]

from someone who doesn't seem to have tried the technology you sound like a credible source. it's something i'd be willing to give a try (assuming good feed back from those who have actually use the tech) if i were to decide to give up cable tv as well.

from what i've experienced, cable service doesn't go down because the servers go down. it goes down because something cut a line somewhere. if it's a server, they would be able to swap it out instantly. if they have any kind of a data center, they already have incredible redundancy built into their network. raid drives, server cluster/farms, etc, etc.

my phone service doesn't go down because i'm making a call that would normally go through a specific area's router that happens to be down (unless that router is my first hop out to the rest of the world). my call gets rerouted to other phone routers and gets to the destination.

tech support, is that like, i'm not getting an ip address, can you help me? i would guess that new technologies have extra tech support avail untill the number of customers start to exceed what staff is available. they want to get the people trained at a reasonable pace while they can. but that's all speculation on my part.

An alternative to DSL or Cable?

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

"They claim a 300 to 500 kilobit per second"

How can that compare to the 2-6Mbit of DSL or the ~3Mbit of Cable?

Plus it makes the radio enthusiasts pretty pissed off.

I'd stick with what's been tested. For now, at least.

Max Power

[BladeMelbourne]

rock-solid performance since the only downtime would be when the power grid goes down

Unless you have UPS, a generator or are using a notebook, that shouldn't be a problem as your desktop PC wouldn't be working either ;-)

Re:Reliability? yeah right...

[TheLink]

There are so many ways for your connection to the internet to be disrupted which don't involve the power grid going down.

The power company has to connect to the rest of the internet somewhere right? So think of how that could fail.

The power company probably puts lots of equipment in the same server room. What if both redundant air conditioners go down?

What if an admin screws up with their BGP?

So the statement that implies downtime only when power grid goes down is really stupid.

Re:Security

[lizrd]

Why?

Once you send your data to that box on the pole it is on an untrusted network. You don't know what is going to happen to it or who can look at it so it really doesn't matter if it is encrypted or not.

The main reason you would want to use some sort of encryption in this scenerio is for access control. If the ISP thinks that MAC authenticaiton (which is exceedingly weak) is sufficient to keep too many people from using the service without paying, then it's probably good enough.

Also when they bag the whole idea

[n1ywb]

BPL test areas are starting to get shut down left and right as interference complaints and excesive radiated power measurements start rolling in. Don't say f-you to your cable company yet.