BPL Ham

Back in August 2006, the FCC said it would support BPL, Broadband over Power Lines. It was known at the time that ham radio operators complained that BPL interfered with their signals.

The Amateur radio association ARRL has actually been complaining to the FCC about this since at least October 2005. Given the FCC's announcement about BPL in the same month in which they did away with the remnants of net neutrality, I have to wonder whether BPL is a real player or whether it was just useful for the FCC to act as if it was in order to claim there is competition even most people get their Internet access via telco DSL or cable modem. One criterion for saying an essential access bottleneck monopoly is not needing government intervention is that there is a feasible technical alternative in the near future; is that the source of the FCC's interest in BPL? Another interesting question is: how fast is BPL, really? Reports are all over the map from a few hundred Kbps to 100 Mbps.

-jsq