Remember the idea of using power cables as a medium to transmit high-speed Internet traffic?
The concept was all the rage in the late 1990s but then high-profile suppliers, such as Nortel/Norweb, Siemens and more recently RWE, pulled out the market citing regulatory issues and slow sales. As a result, ADSL cemented its position as the primary means to deliver broadband to consumers.
However the technology hasn"t gone away; far from it. Scotland last weekend reaffirmed their commitment to develop Power Line Communications (PLC) as a competitive broadband access and in-home LAN technology. It"s hoped that the technology offers an economicall viable way of deploying broadband services in rural Scotland.
According to Antony Lole, a Telecom Infrastructure Manager at SSE, the trial is still in its early stages, with just a dozen or so customers connected in the Crieff and Campbeltown areas of Perthshire. However results so far are encouraging, and guinea pigs are seeing good throughputs, in some cases getting a symmetric connection delivering speeds in excess of 1Mbps.