Broadband on powerlines

If this works well, and is cheap, and can support voice, then this could certainly be a good answer to rural connectivity problems. What more does anybody need - get electricity on power lines, and Internet on the same too! Trials are underway and they sound promising, but I don't really know what to believe because there are articles which argue quite the oppositie. There are other issues too. Using the BPL infrastructure to backhaul data all the way to the Internet will need villages to be wired into the grid, but this may not always be possible, or even needed, when stand-alone power plants can be used to supply energy to the village and other neighboring ones as well. If BPL cannot support voice then it will become hard to sustain and maintain it on the basis of data alone, and communication lines will have to be laid out anyways. Things are not so simple really...

But India is apparently looking at BPL as a viable solution to rural communication. Indeed, in places where the infrastructure does not exist at all, only the best solutions should be implemented, be it BPL, or WiMax, or WiFi, all integrated with the PSTN network where ever it is available.