The FCC finally cleared the way yesterday for broadband over power lines (BPL), the infamous “third wire.” This means that all of you who currently have a choice between your cable company’s broadband and your phone company’s DSL will (eventually) have a third choice: the power company! Here’s hoping the electric companies really embrace this (they already have in NYC) and become a contender, so we can see our rates drop a bit. The best news, however, is that although these current implementors are talking about DSL-like speeds, Ambient, the company providing the technology claims they can already deliver 20 megabits to the lamppost and will be up to 100 megabits by next year. This translates into 1.5 to 4 mbps for consumer use. And unlike DSL, it doesn’t seem to have that incredibly short range problem, so it could bring broadband to places it’s never been.
Of course, there’s a downside: Ambient’s website has this to say: “The ability to carry video signals suggests that there are opportunities in surveillance and security. Monitoring of remote, unmanned facilities and continuous transmission of security-related data … are obvious applications.” So, yeah, we could slap a video camera on every lamp-post and have an instant surveillance network.
In other news: the FCC also announced the deregulation of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), so telephone companies will no longer be the only ones allowed to lay fiber. While this may bring some competition into the market, it also means that companies can build high-speed fiber-optic lines to within 500 feet of customers’ homes without having to share the new lines with rival companies … so, if you’re lucky, you’ll soon have fiber-optic speed broadband potential, and if you’re really lucky, your street will be dug up four or five times by different companies laying seperate fiber optic lines …
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The BPL surveillance possibilities are endless. Any appliance that plugs into the wall will be able to communicate with any other location or device in the world. If you bought the device (perhaps a refrigerator or a toaster) with a credit card, the serial number of the device can go into a database. Then it is possible for someone to know who has the device, and then it’s communications capabilities can be initialized over the internet and it can then start supplying information about how it is used and who is using it. Of course, it is not a problem to embed other technologies into any plug-in appliance. A small microphone or camera can be hidden in almost anything.
BPL is insidious and it opens endless possibilities for spying on the general public.