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?"

How is this legal?

[OneDeeTenTee]

If it is causing so much interferance I would hope that it would be easy to stop or moderate.

How strong is the interferance?

How far from the power lines does it extend? (Of course power lines are everywhere, so even a 10 meter wide stretch of interferance would be significant.)

Re:How is this legal?

[Student_Tech]

From what I understand, it isn't so much a specific interferance as just a raising of the static noise so that signals which would have been receivable before fade into the noise.

Not just the HAM guys...

[gus goose]

... for the record, those of us flying Remote Controlled aircraft are gravely concerned about the potential impact (no puns intended). We use 72Mhz Transmitters, and the harmonics and other stuff I don't understand are apparently causing significant control issues with our aircraft.

gus

well.

[itzdandy]

unless, BoP systems can obliterate cable or DSL in price-to-performance, why even do it? sure it's a proof of concept and that the technology works, but is it worth it?

from what i have read, BoP adds a fair amount of 'white noise' that causes ham radioers and 802.11x users a bit of trouble. These users must boost their signal to compensate and that lowers speed or quality of signal or completely destroys it if the signal were fairly weak in the first place.

I can see how the system would be usefull for those outside cable and DSL grids like rural areas of the US's northwest(montana, wyoming, dakotas) where the distance is too great for the current standards BUT does BoP extend into these areas?