Is mounted on a power pole near my house. It’s about 20 feet off the ground and has what looks to be a UHF antenna mounted on the bottom. It’s connected to a ground mounted pedestal involved with the new fiber optic internet service they are installing in my area.
I don’t believe it’s for wireless access, but it could be for monitoring the activity on the fiber system. It was installed earlier this week, and the internet is not yet activated.
Google was experimenting with running fiber connections to every residence, but that’s expensive, so they’re transitioning to a fast wireless solution. So perhaps what you’re seeing is similar infrastructure (from Google or another company)?
We get out phone and Internet from Centurytel. DSL currently is 1.5 Meg. The improved is supposed to be 10 meg. Still not great, but when you live in a rural area you’ve got to give up technology I guess.
No, not your link. Sorry if it was confusing. I did an image search with the posted image and at least the first 60 images were bike racks and weight benches.
Our smart electric meters are read right over the power lines. I agree that it seems to be an access point of some sort. Wondering who’s and what is going to be used for. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.
Its a zigby base station for the smart power meters.
Around here, the power companies are using the same frequencies as WIFI for a zigby distributed network to access smart metres.
Distributed network is like AD HOC wifi … No one ever used AD HOC, but thats not the point.
The point is that the zigby means that can have base station , then N smart meters, and then your smart meter… If the N smart meters can talk to the neighbours so there is no gap in the overlapping of their range … between base station and your meter, your meter can report your electricity usage every half hour at least. This means that the meter reader doesn’t have to visit your house or even your street to get your usage, and you get to be told about usage in half hour or even five minute lumps, even real time, just an hour or a few hours after usage.
Basically, every smart meter can relay the other smart meters transmissions to the base station, or to other smart meters. So its a self healing network, if the path currently in use is taken out, it will determine another path automatically - if its possible. Of course there will not always be an alternative path but it shouldn’t be a problem, as you couldn’t have usage in most cases.
It does look like a wi-fi access point to me. Whether for smart meters, community wireless, carrier wireless, or something else is a whole other story. If you have a wi-fi scanning app on your phone (or on an iPhone use Apple’s AirPort Utility) you can walk up to it and should be able to see a pretty strong signal (-30 dBm is the theoretical maximum signal strength, and by the time you get to -70 or -75 dBm it’s starting to become quite unreliable). It may even have a name that will tell you something about what it is, like AT&T Wi-Fi or DukeEnergy12345, but it may very well have an unlisted name.
Well, fiber down the highway, and pots to the houses. I’m 3/4 mile from the hi way. The furthest in my little subdivision is about 1 mile from the hi way where the fiber is.
10 meg isn’t fast, but it’s about seven time faster than what we have now.
When the weather is better I’ll capture the number on the equipment and check to see if the connection cable goes to the fiber pedestal.
Thanks for all the information so far. I might call the power company engineering department tomorrow.
