Quick news brief from 'network magazine':
Paraphrased:
IEEE is drafting the 802.3af standard which will allow electricity to travel
along regular cat3 and cat 5 cables along with 10baseT and 100baseTX
ethernet. Non-802.3af equipment won't be fried ;) because the protocol
will only send power if the device requests it via a handshaking protocol.
Lucent and Siemens and others are already producing hubs and phones based on
the early drafts of the standard, and shown them to be interoperable. Cisco
is the only vendor who has produced a power-over-ethernet switch, however
they use their own proprietary system, incompatible with 802.3af. The
standard requires both ac and dc, whereas cisco's system only uses dc.
Twisted pair copper carries no more than 10 watts of power, while most
computers require atleast 40 watts. Powerdsine, the technology's inventor
believes it will be sufficient for a new generation of energy-efficient
laptops, ip phones, pdas and webcams.
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/3/af/index.html
--Hmmm, I wonder how this will work with wearable computers. Plug an
ethernet wire into your ***, send email and get recharged! What about
Powerdsine tickers?
