There's broadband hope yet for those of us living in the sticks; too far for the cable companies to care about and too many feet of copper for DSL to work. BPL.
The trick, at least in this country, has been how to get high frequency signals/carriers through the step up / step down transformers (which act as low pass filters) everywhere on the grid. The article alludes to this issue but simply says that technology will be installed to "jump" the transformers. Ok... but how will *that* work? And what will it cost?
This was a technical "chestnut" at GE's R&D center for years, because GE wanted to be able to read electrical meters over - guess what? - the very electrical lines the meters were connected to. The transformers presented a tough technical challenge. (It may be of interest that the business reason for this project was not that GE would make money on the meters it sold, but rather that it would make a ton on the monetary float - it would collect billions a year in billings for the power companies and turn around and pay the utilities after some amount of time, racking up interest on the money in the interim.)
The interesting challenge here - the jugular issue for this project - is how *specifically* they're going to jump the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of transformers reliably and how much that will cost.
Rural Electrification Administration
