Broadband via Electricity Wires

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Electric cables used for hotel broadband
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Both the Register and the BBC have articles on your household electricity supply being a source of data movement round your own building. I remember this coming up a few years back and it never seemed to get anywhere, if I remember correctly local lamp posts were acting as relay stations for your data.

Via a not particularly elegant gismo that plugs into the mains socket

the data is fed round the building. So in the case of broadband, your ADSL router output is connected to the mains, and picked up in any other room in the building, where you can plug in another computer to link to the broadband connection. This site or this site have quite a good explanation of what you can buy (disclaimer, I have no connection to either). You can use it for say hi-fi too.

Has anybody got any actual experience of using systems like this, and what have you thought of it?


I vaguely remember something

I vaguely remember something about it last time around but hearing that the data degrades quite badly?

Interesting idea

I think I read a while back they already have the ability to do this in France or Germany, not heard any feedback though.


When I moved to Canada, my landlord said I got free internet access w/ the apartment. It turns out there were 2 ways to get it, both from her connection elsewhere in the building. 1 was wi-fi which worked poorly due to the think walls. The second was a method using the electrical sockets, using an adapter like in that second link. The adapter worked quite well, and I could get good speeds. The uptime was pretty good, but it would go through occasional lags. The cool thing was I could move it from room to room and it would still work.

I ened up having to get my own cable line due to not being able to share this one connection between my 2 computers, but it may have been a problem with my router rather then the internet over wire thing.


The local electricity company has been carrying out live feasibility studies for a couple of years now. Since Austrians are early adopters when it comes to telecom/internet/gadgets, I guess that the lack of news means that there have been stumbling blocks.

I seem to remember impressively high speeds being talked about, but then degrading the further you were from a sub-station (not good in the mountains) and the more people used your network.

Plus broadband is cheap and has a wide coverage.

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