No, its literally powerline technology where data is sent over electrical cables using the mainly voltage and frequency modulation (most likely KV over high frequency). It is estimated that most of the space in copper cables are not used. To give a few references
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-things-powe...eed-know-first/
Essentially its an upscale version of what you can use at home.

However that 1Gb/s is unimpressive actually but its a media catch, we think it means we get 1Gb/s to the house, but truthfully it means the backbone connection is a poultry 1Gb/s, so that means it can only support 100 users at 10Mb/s simultaneously for example. It is also half duplex as well.

To give you another example

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-at-t-int...s-idUSKBN1E70GB

The backbone is unimpressive for wired internet, but if one needs to extend wireless internet like mobile internet cheaply this is one way to do it as you have both power and data on the same cable utilising existing infrastructure. Laying fiber optics is actually not cheap.

The ones used at home at most are rated for 2Gb/s (i have a pair of them), in practice they sync at 10x less speed providing 200Mb/s over ground, live and neutral using 240V 50Hz encoding in live/neutral, and some other high frequency on ground if conditions permit.

This post has been edited by System Error Message: Jan 10 2019, 12:52 AM