AT&T will begin trials to bring Gigabit wireless internet over power lines. It was mentioned in the last show that one of the biggest obstacles is the last mile. This could bring fast internet wherever power lines are. I would hope that, assuming AT&T holds the patents, that this could be licensed out to help competition.
It looks like this technology still requires quite a lot of hardware installed along the power lines. They’re simply modulating a 5G mmWave signal onto the power cables, which has to be regenerated at regular intervals. Not sure if this will actually be cheaper than just running a couple of fibre optics cables along the power cables like we do here in Europe. Especially since power cables were never built for high frequencies, they’re about the worst telecommunications medium one could imagine.