Broadband goes global?

CenterPoint Energy is testing a system to bring high-speed Internet access to consumers through the medium it knows best — the electric wall socket.

The company that owns the power lines throughout Houston is running a pilot of the system in a Greenway Plaza-area residential neighborhood, offering Internet access at speeds more than one-and-a-half times the speed of services offered through cable modems.

The technology, called broadband over power lines, or BPL, has long been used by power companies to monitor and manage their electric grids, said Thomas Standish, chief operating officer of CenterPoint's Electric and Information Technology business. BPL gives you an instantly networked home without having to run new wiring," said Raymond Blair, IBM's vice president of BPL initiatives. IBM is partnering with CenterPoint to deploy and test the system.
The BPL technology under development has the potential to allow any piece of equipment with a power plug to communicate with any other such piece of equipment, Blair said.

For example, a soda machine could tell when it's out of a certain brand. We need more mr. Pibb, its selling like hot cakes over here.

Wow. So could happen if the slums of Bangladesh or Dimwitty Virginia's of the world got broadband? Finally the Internet revolution would be realized and our world might be a little flatter. No additional wiring, same data transfer....wow. Finally my parents will be forced to get broadband by doing absolutely nothing.
Deux ex Machina