Earth2Tech.com has some very good – and understandable – articles about Smartgrids.  Here andhereare two recent examples.  But what caught RoadMAP’s attention was a sidebar that shows what an uphill battle it will be to bring the utilities into the current century.  (No one under 40 has likely ever heard of a 1200 baud modem, much less used one.0

The Power Grid Is So Dumb That . . . .
OK, I’ll finish the punchline . . . that a decades-old networking technology, which has disappeared from pretty much all other industries and has a fraction of the bandwidth of current networks, is still one of the most common choices for digitally connecting parts of the power grid. More specifically, according to Pike Research, utilities are commonly using leased telecom lines attached to 1200 baud modems to digitally connect electrical substations in their power grid network.
Most 1200 baud modems have a bit rate (how much data they can move) of 1,200 bits per second. For comparison, average consumer broadband speeds in the U.S. are 9.9 Mbit/s (1 Mbit is 1 million bits). So a 1,200 bit per second modem is more than 8,000 times slower than a 9.9 Mbit/s Internet device. My scientific conclusion is that’s hella old and slow.

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