Google wants to be your Internet

Tue Jan 23 16:23:54 UTC 2007

Dan,

there's one very big assumption in your statement: cost of BPL for metering is economical or workable in the regulatory model.  Forget value added services for a moment, the cost often cannot be burdened on the rate payer (regulatory constraint).  So, funding this sort of effort is non-trivial.

Best regards,
Christian

--
Sent from my BlackBerry.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Golding <dgolding at t1r.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2007 18:52:45 
To:Niels Bakker <niels=nanog at bakker.net>
Cc:nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Re: Google wants to be your Internet

One interesting point - they plan to use Broadband over Power Line (BPL) technology to do this. Meter monitoring is the killer app for BPL, which can then also be used for home broadband, Meter reading is one of the top costs and trickiest problems for utilities. 

- Dan

On Jan 22, 2007, at 12:28 PM, Niels Bakker wrote:

* nanog at shankland.org: <mailto:nanog at shankland.org>  (Jim Shankland) [Mon 22 Jan 2007, 18:21 CET]: 
"Travis H." <travis+ml-nanog at subspacefield.org: <mailto:travis+ml-nanog at subspacefield.org> > writes: 
IIRC, someone representing the electrical companies approached someone representing network providers, possibly the IETF, to ask about the feasibility of using IP to monitor the electrical meters throughout the US....
The response was "yeah, well, maybe with IPv6". 

Which is nonsense.  More gently, it's only true if you not only want to use IP to monitor electrical meters, but want the use the (global) Internet to monitor electrical meters.

I'd love to hear the business case for why my home electrical meter needs to be directly IP-addressable from an Internet cafe in Lagos. 

It's not nonsense.  Those elements need to be unique.  RFC1918 isn't unique enough (think what happens during a corporate merger).

	-- Niels. 