Parlez-vous Internet?

Posted on 2 Jul 2002 at 17:35

If you can't speak the Net lingo, don't worry, as Davey Winder has all the answers - in good old plain English.

Solution: First things first. The scheme being developed by Nortel and Norweb isn't available to the public at large yet, although technology trials have been running in Manchester for a while and one school is hooked up by the mains. More widespread delivery of the service is expected around April or May. So the answer to your last query is, you don't contact anybody about getting connected by the mains quite yet. Keep an eye on the Nortel and Norweb sites (http://www. nortel. com/home/ home.html and http://www.norweb.co.uk/).

As to how it works, in theory it's quite simple. Think of your house, and all the other houses fed from the same electricity substation, as forming a huge LAN, with the power cables as the carrier. The substation is linked to the Internet backbone by way of an optic-fibre connection, and it relays Internet signals across the 250V low-voltage power lines to a data conversion box in your house, close to your electricity meter, which separates the high-frequency data signals from the 50Hz mains current. You just plug your PC's Ethernet card (or possibly a USB connection) directly into this box.

You'll probably only be able to use this service if you live fairly close (300m) to a substation, as otherwise electrical interference on the line can cause chaos with the data transmissions. If, like me, you live and work in a very rural location you're probably out of luck, although the technology may advance enough to allow supply over a greater radius.

As for access speed, the maximum possible rate over a power line will be 1Mbits/sec, or about 20 times as fast as that ISDN connection you're thinking about. Unfortunately, this 1Mbits/sec isn't for you alone, but has to be shared among all the users served by a single substation, and that can dramatically reduce the access speed you're likely to see. Nortel reckons that something between 500Kbits/sec and 1Mbits/sec will be the norm, although I have a feeling that with a few hundred users all actively uploading or downloading data that average transfer rate will go a lot lower.

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