Texas utility to offer Internet service via power lines at rate of three megajoules

[Mofoka]

Dallas Texas – The utility TXU Corp. said Monday it will offer high-speed Internet service over power lines to several million Texans as part of a $150 million project aimed at improving its ability to monitor the power grid.
The "smart grid" buildout will enable what would be the nation's largest broadband-over-power line Internet rollout.
 
The 10-year partnership with Current Communications Group Inc., a privately held company in Germantown, Md., is not, however, expected to yield residental Internet service until the second half of 2006.

TXU spokesman Chris Schein said Internet access was secondary to the smart grid capabilities.

"We really believe that what end users are going to appreciate is when the spring storms hit and they don't have an outage," he said. "Or if they do have an outage, it's not as long as it was."

Construction on the smart grid system will begin early next year along TXU's 14,000 miles of transmission lines and 100,000 miles of distribution lines.

The deal gives Current access to more than 2 million business and residential customers, mostly in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Proponents say broadband-over-power line technology, or BPL, could be especially significant for rural areas, where high-speed Internet access has lagged due to the higher costs to telecommunications and cable companies of serving sparsely populated areas.

Great News for 56kers!

More information can be found Here

[sithdemon]

it'll be great for rural areas, however in the city it's almost too late for it to be a big ISP player. Cities defently need smart grids to prevent outages, but more importantly conserve and have surplus energy at times, since it won't just dump into homes, but not for ISPs, between DSL/cable/fiber optic and wireless theres enough covered.

It should end the 56k era though, perhaps even in developing coutries.

[TaLoN]

I mean what kinda speeds are we talking here, what the hell is a Mega Joule?
The early Theory behind the powerlines broadband stated they would blow away t1 t3 lines in speed, if thats the case and its priced at the norm of 30-40 bucks a month then Im switching asap.

[Mofoka]

I mean what kinda speeds are we talking here, what the hell is a Mega Joule?

LOL! It's a power rating, Unit of energy equivalent to 1 million joules. (J). One Megajoule is equivalent to 0.2778 kWh.

It was a joke though, you know like from back to the future.... 1.21 gigawatts

The early Theory behind the powerlines broadband stated they would blow away t1 t3 lines in speed, if thats the case and its priced at the norm of 30-40 bucks a month then Im switching asap.

True, I hear the Ohio gets Fiber Optic speeds of 15 to 20 mbps down and 10 mbps up.

[Bubblehead]

As I recall from reading about power line broadband back a few years ago, one of the big hurtles was transformers ... any idea how they're getting around them now?

[Phrag]

I remember reading about a company called mediafusion that was experimenting with this technology back in the mid-90s. They were more focused on moving bandwidth through the magnetic fields that surround the power line instead of the line itself. This is much more difficult because of interference from other magnetic fields and radiation but they had tested with speeds up to 2.5 gigs per second in the lab.