Motorola to Marry BPL and Wireless 79
prostoalex writes "Motorola is combining Intellon broadband-over-powerline chips with its own Canopy wireless systems to create an end-to-end broadband delivery system, where last mile delivery would be covered by wireless and broadband pipe would belong to electric utility. HomePlug AV standard will offer 200 Mbps downstream speed."
Re:Future Internet delivery (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Stupid Idea (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Too Expensive (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Future Internet delivery (Score:2, Informative)
Canopy is a 'fixed wireless' sort of thing, so you would have an access point somewhere that could serve up to a few hundred or so subscriber modules. The subscriber modules would go on power poles, behind the transformers (ie, between the transformer and the end users). It would then be BPL from there into up to, if I recall, 8 homes or so. So, it lets you deploy Canopy to an area, but reduce your costs as you can feed more than one home with a single Canopy module.
As such, except for use of the 900mhz or 5.4Ghz spectrum, this would not be putting out enough power to interfere with ham radios or anything else. A good solution if you ask me. And you don't have to worry much about the 'cable modem' kind of hub bog downs, as it is just you and a few other people on the same backhaul link to the access point.
I do work for Motorola from time to time, and have seen this in person, and it is a quite nice solution.
Reviewed Canopy for work a year ago (Score:3, Informative)
-administration via telnet & http, no ssh or https
-no way to filter administrative connections based on source IP address
-administrative access is based on a locally defined username & password on each access point and subscriber module. they can't authenticate admin sessions from a radius or tacacs server
-the encryption suite is proprietary. while they do use AES as the encryption algorithm, the overall protocol is not based on IPSec, WPA, WEP, or any other standard
-subscriber modules use a manufacturers default encryption key to authenticate to the access point. a key management server must be implemented use a different key.
I don't know if any of that has been fixed in the past year or not. I have no clue how they got this device FIPS 140-2 certified. Unsurprisingly the security through obscurity worshipping government agencies I deal with are completely ga-ga over the Canopy. They are in love with the idea that the Canopy runs on a non 802.11 a/b/g frequency (because obviously no bad hackers will ever find it).
Re:Too Expensive (Score:3, Informative)
The $300 is high enough that people feel committed to the service (we don't need contract lock-in to keep customers) and is low enough that most of our customers can afford it. They can always take their SM to one of our competitors if they don't like our service.