Nigel Goodwin

As far as I know it is, certainly sticking RF down the power lines is going to radiate somewhere!.

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Sceadwian

Gramo, think of the length of a wifi antenna. About what, 4-6 inches? Power cables are not shielded, which effectivly makes them an antenna. Now attach something that is capable of wifi speeds to it. Bad things happen =) I wined about this extensivly in a previous post a few months ago. Even if you share a common branch network to 10 or more homes the harmonics you're going to create from the mismatched transmitters extend well past even the maximum bandwidth of the lines because it's a digital signal. Every single user bleeds out that much more of a percentage of the bandwidth they have available, regardless of weather or not it's used. At human scale ranges even time dialation effects on clock phase bleed becomes an issue, and that doesn't include whatever universal or freak capacitive or inductive reactance that is native to the local system. Makes over the air RF look simple, and most people die without ever understanding that on anything more than the most trivial of levels.

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ex-navy

A common practice as we did in the military is to set up a wifi bridge.

It's a simple wifi repeater system, (leap frog) using 2 or 3 seperate routers.

For example, from the ISP provider's last ethernet point, install a Linksys router with a yagi antenna pointed in the direction of your home.

Have that router set up with DHCP disabled and assign only one static IP address. This will be the IP address of the next station.

This is the transmitter router.

Install another Linksys router with a directional yagi, pointed in the direction of the transmitting yagi.

Set up the 2nd router to use the DHCP and have it's IP address as the same as the one assigned by the transmitter. Set up the DHCP so it only assigns two IP addresses. Take the ethernet cable out to a 3rd router. This will be the last one.

Using a yagi off of the 3rd router, point it at your house. Assign an Ip address that was one of the 2 from the second router.

The 2nd Ip address will be your house wifi units.

I think you might get the picture of what is happening.

If you have to do 2 hops, you need 3 routers, 3 hops, 4 routers, etc.

This is the same as we used in the Navy for satellite hopping.

The routers do not need to be 2.4Ghz Wifi, you can mix and match from 2.4 or 5 GHZ ISM bands.

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Super_voip

As each router is "store and forwad" the baud rate drops with each hop.
The BPL option is very bad as the power lines are very unbalanced cable as there is an earth connection to the neutral wire every couple of poles, having said that I'm applying for a job with a power provider to investigate just this option.
On a positive note there are some long range data transmitters available. I have been using NextG modems (850MHz HSPDA WCDMA) from a telco which will have a data speed of 22Mb available this year and 42Mb next year. I think this is equivlent to WiMax but I haven't really looked at WiMax as it isn't available here.