« T-Mobile Says $1.4M Per Month Revenue in 2003 | Main | Alcatel, Intel Team for WiMax »

March 26, 2004

Rural Electrification Pays Off with Bandwidth

By Glenn Fleishman

Central Virginia Electric Cooperative will offer power-line networking direct into the home along 500 miles of wiring to 4,000 households: This not-for-profit electric cooperative is working with International Broadband Electric Communications to run signals straight to users. Some systems are deployed in a combination that uses Wi-Fi to bypass the home step-down transformer that otherwise interrupts the signal. In this system, they’re using a physical bypass. Customers plug in HomePlug adapters to get 256 Kbps symmetrical service for $29.95 per month.

Rural electrification was an attempt started in 1935 to bring the benefits of labor-saving devices to the farm, including appliances and refrigeration. One of the goals was to improve the lot of the rural citizen; another to stem migration.

The former may have worked, but the latter didn’t. In the current age in which people have become increasingly tired of the pace and nature of an urban lifestyle and are fleeing to exurbs (more widely spaced neighborhoods that border suburbs on one side and rural areas on the other), rural bandwidthification may be part of the next chapter that sees some outflow to less dense regions as well as improving the informational lot of the rural citizen.

Posted by Glennf at March 26, 2004 7:34 AM

Categories: Power Line

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://db.isbn.nu/mt3/mt-tb.pl/1722

Comments