I for one welcome our new broadband-over-powerline overlords

From the ARRL release today: "IBEC's equipment doesn't use the ham bands," said BPL expert and ARRL Laboratory Manager Ed Hare, W1RFI, "making it less likely that they will have any interference complaints from amateurs. Their equipment, however, does interfere with shortwave broadcast and other spectrum, but in the US, not many users have complained. IBM has been in the BPL business for a few years now, so this venture is nothing new for them." IBEC staff member Brent Zitting, KB4SL, serves as a member of ARRL's EMC Committee.

IBM is so busy building research institutes in China and India that it only has time to draw extra profit from rural U.S. farmers- nothing more from its' historical American profit base. This idiotic alternate to modern high-speed data link technologies is only suitable as a precursor to dominance in control of energy distribution and management technology. Like the proprietary-buss PC, IBM will cause disruption in the smooth evolution of social technologies and then move on to other areas of modern life to squeeze more profits. What is Mr. Palmisano thinking?!!!

Unfortunately IBM has not paid attention to well known BPL issues and litigation based on the FCC''s failure to properly administer and enforce FCC Part 15 of their regulations pertaining to preventing radiated interference to existing FCC licensed RF services. This will inevitably lead to costly litigation for the BPL Licensees as well as the FCC. Of course you and I will be paying the FCC''s litigation bill through our taxes that are collected by the IRS. Performance of previously installed systems has been proven in general terms to yield marginal to poor performance at best. Other FCC regulation compliant last mile or 10 mile wireless data interconnect / transport solutions are becoming available shortly that will make BPL obsolete before it would be fully deployed! IBM should do their homework before reopening old cans of worms. Those who choose to ignore history are doomed to repeat it! This is guaranteed to be a looser as soon as the contract is signed or as they say "DOS" or Dead-on-Signing!

Somewhat dumb question: Why not have WiMax repeaters on the power poles? Use the pole/tower to hold the repeater and antennas plus a power tap to the line? This avoids creating yet another flavor of bandwidth pipe with its different hardware and development cost.

Well there goes the amateur radio community ability to communicate all over the world with the increased noise level from the broad band signals. This has already been proven to be more than a nuisance in Virginia.