🚀 go-pugleaf

Reposted from comp.internet.net-happenings:

> Date:         Sat, 11 Oct 1997 16:07:50 -0400
> From: John Walker <jwalker@TOR.HOOKUP.NET>
> 
> Power lines can't handle phone calls but might be ticket to Internet,
> Nortel finds
> 
>                   Tom Spears
>                   The Ottawa Citizen
> 
> http://www.southam.com/calgaryherald/cgi/newsnow.pl?nkey=ch&file=/busi
> ness/technology/971009/t1009mt01.html
> 
> In the grand old tradition of serendipity in science, researchers who
> tried to send phone conversations through ordinary electric wires
> failed in that but found they could send something else: data
> transmissions.
> 
> That discovery culminated in yesterday's announcement by Northern
> Telecom in England. The company says it can link personal computers
> with the Internet and e-mail through the wires that supply power to
> people's homes.
> 
> The system works only in European and Asian countries, because North
> American electrical utilities uses a different arrangement of
> transformers that blots out the signals.
> 
> But Nortel said a variation on the new technology could appear here
> in two years or more.
> 
> The research started when power companies got jealous.
> 
> There are three kinds of wires coming into your house or apartment,
> and it used to be that only two of them could carry signals.
> 
> The telephone line carries your voice, fax messages, and other data
> such as signals from a computer modem, using a signal superimposed on
> an electric current. It connects you to the Internet, if you want it
> to.
> 
> The cable TV wire carries a variety of signals on a current, too,
> from dozens of different channels at once.
> 
> But the third kind of wire traditionally carries only electricity --
> a huge torrent of dumb electrons rushing along to power your
> refrigerator and lights and hair dryer. Current, but no signal.
> 
> "Power companies since the early 1990s have been looking at carrying
> voice," said Nortel's Michelle Murray.
> 
> In those early days, they weren't thinking of computer
> communications. "Back then, the Internet was just a blip."
> 
> Trying to send telephone calls through normal electrical wires didn't
> work in the past. The signals were overwhelmed with electrical
> "noise" -- the jumble of the basic current rushing along.
> 
> Then the Internet grew and grew, and suddenly the question became:
> What if we can send computer transmissions through electric cables?
> 
> Turns out they could. By encrypting and compressing the data, the
> Nortel lab in Harlow, England, was able to keep it separate from the
> noise of all those electrons powering your home.
> 
> Nortel says a simple card added to the home computer, and a box
> installed outside the home, near the electrical meter, are all a
> customer needs.
> 
> It takes advantage of the fact that electrical utilities already have
> widespread networks of fibre-optic cable to keep an eye on their own
> infrastructure. You can send signals through fibre-optic lines
> easily.
> 
> The trick comes near the customer. For starters, the signal can't
> survive passing through a transformer. Nortel's solution is to bypass
> the transformer, linking the fibre-optic cable directly to the
> low-voltage power line going from the transformer to people's homes.
> 
> The company says that turns all the homes served by a single
> transformer into a local area network, like a group of separate
> computers linked within a single company's offices.
> 
> Nortel is still working on bringing the new technology to North
> America, Ms. Murray said.
> 
> The obstacle here is that we have far more transformers -- one for
> every handful of houses instead one transformer for several hundred
> homes. That makes it uneconomical to set up a separate local area
> network for every four or five homes.
> 
> The curator of physical science at the National Museum of Science and
> Technology doesn't think the new way of sending data will ever come
> to North America.
> 
> It just isn't needed here because North America better Internet
> access to start with, said Randall Brooks.
> 
> "It's a stop-gap solution" designed to overcome problems that only
> exist in Europe, he said. One problem is that telephone service can
> be more expensive there, which makes tying up phone lines for Internet
> access too costly for many people.
> 
> ---------------
> 
> Also in this issue:
> 
> - Power lines can't handle phone calls but might be ticket to Internet,
>   Nortel finds
>     In the grand old tradition of serendipity in science, researchers who
>     tried to send phone conversations through ordinary electric wires
>     failed in that but found they could send something else: data
>     transmissions.
> - E-mail: hotbed of insecurity
>     As if it weren't easy enough to find pornography on the Internet,
>     last week some of the stuff showed up uninvited in my electronic
>     mailbox. Fan mail from a spammer? Not quite. The grubby items came
>     courtesy of the SANS Institute, a major computer security
>     organization. At least that's what the return address said. And
>     e-mail return addresses don't mean a thing.
> - Understanding Java Servlets, A Special Report
>     What is the difference between a Java applet and a Java servlet?
>     Basically, a servlet is the opposite end of an applet. A servlet can
>     almost be thought of as a server-side applet. Servlets run inside the
>     Web server in the way that applets run inside the Web browser. The
>     browser can submit a request to execute a servlet directly; it can be
>     stand-alone in terms of its actions -- as a browser can request an
>     applet directly.
> - This report includes links to:
>     * Developing Java Servlets: A Tutorial
>       In this first part of a series on developing
>       Java servlets, William Crawford shows how to
>       create a basic servlet. It includes
>       information about downloading the Java
>       Servlet Development Kit from Sun.
>     * Java Servlets Reference Guide
>       This guide organizes useful information for Java servlet developers.
> - New Lists and Journals
>     1) Kluwer Academic Publishers/OCLC
>     2) Wiley InterScience
>     3) Journal of Fluid Mechanics
>     4) Journal of Functional Programming
>     5) Journal of Latin American Studies
>     6) Journal of the London Mathematical Society
>     7) The Journal of Modern African Studies
>     8) Journal of Plasma Physics
>     9) Journal of Social Policy
>    10) Mathematical Structures in Computer Science
>    11) Share International
>    12) Pig Meat
> 
> Tomorrow
> 
> - The Globalization of Chile
>     The wires are clogged again in Chile, a country with no shortage of
>     Net-enthusiasm but little way to express it. Bandwidth is so limited
>     in this remote country, which stretches almost to Antarctica, that
>     local netizens wake up early or stay up late to log in (this report
>     had to be filed via fax).
> - Sizable questions surround electric net access.
>     Some sizable questions surround Wednesday's announcement by Canada's
>     Northern Telecom and Britain's Norweb Communications of a technology
>     Nortel has developed that enables high-speed Net access through
>     existing electric lines - giving utilities an apparent easy-in to
>     becoming communication providers via their own power-line
>     infrastructures.
> - HTTP Improvements Make the Internet Faster
>     HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP) is the way World Wide Web
>     browsers and Web servers communicate with each other. Although E-mail
>     is still the most widely used Internet application, statistics confirm
>     that HTTP is responsible for more Internet traffic than any other
>     protocol.
> - UUNet provides colocation service, faster links to Net
>     WorldCom subsidiary UUNet Technologies Wednesday at NetWorld+Interop
>     announced OC-3 speed connectivity now available to corporate
>     customers and ISPs, and a new colocation service.
> - Germany's Christian Democrats in cyberspace
>     Proceedings of next week's congress of Chancellor Helmut Kohl's
>     Christian Democratic Union party in Leipzig will be broadcast on the
>     Internet, the party said Saturday.
> - Gates, Chernomyrdin agree on software piracy
>     Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, meeting with Microsoft chairman
>     Bill Gates on Saturday, vowed to help fight software piracy, adding
>     that he believed Russia was ready to work to protect intellectual
>     property.
> - Graduate school test goes all-computer
>     Leave the No. 2 pencils at home. The standardized test for graduate
>     business schools is going all-computer.
> - National Semiconductor Sets Up Global Intranet Program
>     National Semiconductor Corporation announced the launch of a global
>     private network for the deployment of Internet, intranet, and
>     extranet services to be used by its customers, distributors, and
>     employees.
> - New Lists and Journals
>     1) Sewing
>     2) TIPS for Speakers, Trainers and Presenters
>     3) The Leaning Tree, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
>     4) Taming the Net
>     5) NASA STI Bulletin
>     6) Strange Magazine
> 
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> -------------------------------
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--
####    |\^/|     Colin R. Leech     ag414 or crleech@freenet.carleton.ca
#### _|\|   |/|_  Civil engineer by training, transport planner by choice.
#### >         <  Opinions are my own. You may consider them shareware.
####  >_./|\._<   "If you can't return a favour, pass it on." - A.L. Brown