My only knowledge about this is old, so I may not remember it correctly.
A EE buddy of mine back in the 80's was working on a project for a Florida
power company.
I think he worked for Emerson Electric in St. Louis at the time.
The concept was to do remote meter reading and use power lines as the
transport mechanism.
Sounds like a no brainer, right.
If I remember correctly it was a tremendously difficult problem to even get
a data rate of 20 bits per second or so.
The transformers were a huge problem.
I think you may need to bypass them for data, so that means a huge amount of
new equipment.
The "network" has a lot of noise.
My guess is it would be way cheaper, easier and more probable that fixed
wireless is the solution.
Especially to less dense areas with older infrastructure.
I seem to remember that the frequency was a problem as well.

Actually I have recently caught up with him and could ask him his thoughts
if there is interest.
But I agree that it is probably snake oil.

If it was easy to do we would all have broadband to our house today.

Also, remember at the end of the day this stuff has to generate more revenue
than it costs, or you end up with ION all over your face.
No matter how cool it is.

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: lowell [mailto:lowell@kc.rr.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2001 5:37 PM
To: Chris Midkiff
Cc: kclug@kclug.org
Subject: RE: Powerline 4 Megabit/s

Wasn't there a fair sized article on these guys (Media Fusion)
in Wired this month; they smelled snake oil, I believe...
On Tue, 23 Oct 2001, Chris Midkiff wrote:

> This has been in and out of the news for some time...  Media Fusion
received
> a US patent on a device (process??) that allows the IP data to pass around
> transformers in 1999 (http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-1494768.html)
and
> was expected to demonstrate a fully functional system, but has yet to do
so.
> (their http://www.mediafusionllc.com/ site is 'under construction')
> 
> AFAIK, nobody has successfully demonstrated high bandwidth IP data over
> power circuits without dramatically altering the transformers currently in
> place.  This is the real key to this technologies success.  Having to
> replace millions of transformers currently on the grid will make this
> technology as expensive as Fiber to the Home
> (http://www.wbsmith.com/fiber.html) without most of the benefits.
>