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Originally posted by WAVE Admin:
Why move to another wired service.

Check out information on the forthcoming WiMAX technology. Wireless broadband with ranges of several miles.

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Companies have found that turning power lines into a stable, high-speed system of data transmission is tricky. Network interference and such things as transformers and surge arrestors have hindered broadband delivery.

But over the past few years, Shark says, many of those hurdles have been cleared with improved technology. Brightfield says previous efforts to deploy the technology in Europe failed because their electric system differs from that in the United States.

Still, there's no shortage of skepticism.

"I think they're a long ways from proving it; let's leave it there," said Larry Carmichael, a project manager with the Electric Power Research Institute. "The tests to date have been so small, as far as looking at the financial and technical viability. It's still at the very early stage of development."

The technology works like this: Data is carried either by fiber-optic or telephone lines to skip disruptive high-voltage lines, then is injected into the power grid downstream, onto medium-voltage wires.

Because signals can only make it so far before breaking apart, special electronic devices on the line catch packets of data, then reamplify and repackage them before shooting them out again.

Other technologies use more elaborate techniques that detour the signal around transformers.

Either way, the signal makes its way to neighborhoods and customers who could access either it wirelessly, through strategically placed utility poles, or by having it zipped directly into their homes via the regular electric current. Adaptors at individual power outlets ferry the data into computers through their usual ports.