Soon you could be piping digital TV around your home via power sockets.
At the Cebit technology fair, German hi-tech firm Devolo is showing off home networking technology that can handle signals from a set top box.

While many firms are working on ways to route data via the mains power circuits in the home, Devolo is among the first to use it to send TV signals.

Further improvements to the home networking system will help it handle cable and satellite TV signals.
Although many people are connecting up all the digital devices in their home via dedicated computer cables, increasing numbers are choosing networking technology that route data via the same wires that supply electricity to each and every room.

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Does this mean the electric will go up too ?

this means im out the job lol

Probably mean you have to have a special upgrade
At the very least Andy its years away.

Although the Technology has been around for years.

As Mark said, the technology has been around for a while now.

You can buy cheap home networking kits that simply plug into your mains and allow you to network computers and devices together instead of using unsightly network cables running through the house.

I wonder how the principle works? As, theoretically, the close nature and unprotected cables used for digital transmission (i.e. network data or digital TV data) would cause intereference from the power cabling.

Its to do with the frequencies, but can be unreliable,
and if memory serves me correctly its also using the earth cable ?

Cant be sure, but i would guess its moved on a lot since then?

Thats what I thought it might do.

Bit dangerous if it does though especially with the potential of fault current passing through it.

Aparantly, the technology is known as dLAN and can 'aparantly' support up to 85Mbit/sec which is a major improvement over the orignal 14Mbit/sec devices. Although user reviews have recorded transfer rates of only 5.2Mbps, which is still faster than wireless network links.

When using extension leads, performance is greatly reduced.

I can find very little information on the internet about this technology and there are no articles on wikipedia

Matty will find us everything there is to know about it

This will almost certainly be based somewhat on PAN and PDSL, a technology that has been getting promised will do great things for years...

I remember back in the day when a company called summit like Scottsh Hydro Electric or similar started trialling internet services in i think cambletown in Scotland, something like 2Mbps for £15 a month back in ~2002, which was both cheap and extremely fast for the era.

I think they may have trialled it in England somewhere down south under another electric company (maybe Southern Electric), but as far as I know these trial's were never extended to further area's, because the technolog was simply too unreliable for consumers to accept.

In fact I do recall that it was actually Norweb who ran the very first trial's of this type of technology back in the earlyish 90's, for data and communication purposes. Im not sure to what extent their technology was working or quite exactly what service it offered/was hoping to provide, but I believe they were touting internet and possibly voice services, with a slim chance of television. Obviously the technology was in its infancy and digital television itself was only just being developed, so the idea of television running over electric lines was a bit far fetched for the time.

There are many countries in the poorer regions of Asia who recieve telephone lines and internet services via technologies based upon PDSL, and they seem to work well for these regions, but they are usually remote parts of the world, where they are poverty stricken, so it tells you the quality they would expect anyway.

It may work, but personally I can't see it would be the most stable of services, which is why companies that have trielled commercial services using home power lines have failed, and sales of PAN kits have been extremely crap, to the extent I have never come across anyone who uses it.

Good idea in principle, but it will never catch on imho.