[geeks] Google invests in BPL

[roosmcd at dds.nl]

On Tue, Jul 12, 2005 at 06:56:26PM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Indeed... I thought the BPL idea was dead anyway.  Around here they
> couldn't even make demos of it work very well.

 I worked a bit with the Homeplug version a couple of years ago. Back then they
were just getting the results from the BPL tests in Germany. Anyone care to
guess what the conclusions were? :). But at least it's good to know that my
prediction that they would come to the same conclusion in the US than in Germany
but only a couple of years later, was correct.

 IIRC the problem is that the companies want to use as little repeaters as
possible and were using way too much transmitting power. So for a test this was
not a problem since they were able to get exemption from the EMC limits. But for
production systems this is of course not feasible. Oh, and the electricity grid
in the US is also different (inferior :) ) than in Germany.

 The homeplug version works quite well btw. Real plug-and-play stuff; only the
pricing around here is a bit high (79 Euro per adapter; you can get wireless for
14 Euro per card).

  greetings,
    Michiel