Broadband Internet Over Power Line for Rural Areas

[bryanw20]

My co-op announced it last year and as of a few months ago I have it!
Well it's Fiber to the house provided by my co-op; not over the actual power lines.
$55/100/100M $85 1000/1000M service; they provide phone & getting ready to announce TV service too.

As soon as they announced, ATT (my only option for the last 40yrs) decided to run fiber from the service point, upto my neighbors house, then across the street to a newish neighborhood; but not me! Still paying $67for 12/1M dsl, getting 8/.5 on a good day.

So I'm extremely happy now; but sad for Dish as I can now stream for less then their service. Gonna miss the PTAT & auto hop features tho.

 

[Nate Bargmann]

My Co-op, Tombigbee Electric in Hamilton, Alabama has did this to about 2/3 of the service area. Ran fiber along all the lines, they even partnered with the investor owned utility that services part of the area, Alabama Power Co. to use their poles. Service is really great, I have 1Gbps/1Gbps service for $79 per month, and VoIP with them for $29 per month. They plan to cover the entirety of two counties that they serve and portions of two adjacent counties. They’re about 2/3 finished with the project, started about 2 years ago. I bet this is what the Co-op in San Angelo is doing.

Earlier this year your coop was featured in Successful Farming as I recall. It would be nice for our REC to do the same, but they still have much of their plant that dates back to the '40s and '50s to upgrade.

For only $10/month more than you we get 10 Mbps unmetered.

 

[tetrode]

BPL was never a good solution being plagued by a lot of problems including interference to radio comms and interference from radio comms, poor bandwidth to the consumer and high cost. Bridging distribution transformers for data is especially expensive. BPL has been mostly abandoned. However, fiber to the neighborhood along with RF (mostly microwave frequencies) for the last mile or so makes pretty good sense with the power utility owning the poles etc.

 

[arlo]

Although load management devices are in many homes in my area (a pita when you need hot water at 6am in the winter). It only makes sense that a lightning strike would wipe a lot of expensive power line Internet equipment. At any rate, my REC has started running fiber. Lets see how that breaks the monopoly with the local cable/isp provider.