I do admit that I haven't been keeping up on BPL technology lately, as I am not in [and know only one person living in] an area where power lines are the only cabled connection to the world. My point was more that there are areas where it's simply impractical to put out many of the today-common technologies for broadband.

In British Columbia, Canada, they replaced the copper intercity network with fibre back in the early 90s. Maybe intercity is the wrong word considering I saw them running fibre 25 miles from Enderby to Mabel Lake. Look here on Google Maps http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=enderby+bc&ll=50.595007,-118.970 947&spn=0.332142,0.86792 There is actually a road to Mabel lake which you can see in the satellite photo snaking through a valley of small farms. Most of those brown patches are cutblocks up in the mountains where they have harvested logs and nobody lives up there. There is a village at the intersection where a road goes south and another where the road meets the lake. At the time, a telco worker told me that they were mining copper, i.e. they chopped up and collected the copper cable after the fibre came online. When I did some work in another BC city, Prince Rupert, we faced the problem of how to get broadband into the city because the main connection was microwave bounced off a station on top of a nearby mountain. Hiway 16 into the city http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=prince+rupert+bc&ie=UTF8&om=1&z= 10&ll=54.24597,-130.001221&spn=0.380349,1.255188&iwloc=addr ran for a long way with rocky cliffs above on one side and rocky cliffs below to the river on the other side. The only place to put fibre would be to plow right into the gravel fill under the pavement. I don't know if they ever did that but, in general, if people live in a location, there should be a feasible way to get fibre there. It might cost a lot, but that is another question. In mountainous areas with low population, then some form of point-to-point wireless such as microwave, wifi multihop or optical wireless can be used. Note that in really wild and hairy areas, you can get away with laying fibre on top of the ground although I doubt that any "official" organization would accept that. I remember a guy who lived out towards Mabel Lake who powered a water pump for his cattle by running a parallel fence wire under the power lines and stealing a few watts by induction. Really, people in remote rural areas need to band together and do the research to find out how others are solving these problems in other states, other countries and even other continents, such as Africa. --Michael Dillon