Broadband over Power Lines = BAD
Broadband over power lines is an exceedingly bad idea, and should never have been allowed to be mentioned in company.
Let's completely ignore for a moment the differing requirements for a power transmission line (where you want most of the energy that you pump into it to come out of the other end, waveform distortion be damned) and a signal transmission line (where you want the waveform at the far end to resemble as closely as possible the waveform that you fed into it, and don't mind losing a bit of energy to resistance if it helps you achieve that sort of fidelity).
What you don't want in a transmission line of any kind is radiative loss or pickup -- that sort of thing is strictly for antennas.
Look at any cable made for carrying high frequencies and you'll see one of two constructions: either two stiff wires twisted around one another in intimate proximity, or an inner insulated core with a hollow braid surrounding it. This isn't just for the sake of prettiness. The co-axial construction surrounds the signal conductor with a heavy-duty earth conductor, preventing any interference from getting in or out (and having such a low resistance as effectively to have no potential difference along itself). The twisted pair construction depends on being used in a balanced configuration (i.e. when one wire is driven high, the other is driven low and vice versa) and works without a shielding conductor -- in effect, each wire is shielding the other (but only as long as one is high and the other is low).
Power lines were erected for carrying low frequencies. At 50Hz, which is the frequency of the mains in the civilised world, you have a wavelength of 6 megametres; so cold, hard physics says no power line anywhere in the UK (about one megametre all the way from Hampshire to Aberdeenshire) will ever radiate much energy out. But if you were to impose a high-frequency (and therefore shorter wavelength) signal on a power cable, it would make a marvellous antenna, radiating far and wide. In fact, many radio alarm clocks actually use the power cable as a receiving antenna; the domestic ring main picks up a nice strong signal in the 88-108MHz broadcast band, and with all the electronics being fully self-contained inside an insulated enclosure, there are no external connectors to worry about being live.
To transmit one bit of information, you need at least two crests and two troughs of signal (or one crest, one trough and a gap; or maybe one crest and one trough at half the frequency, which still takes the same amount of time). 8Mb/s broadband requires a carrier frequency of 16MHz. And that's for just one user. In a digital system, time-domain multiplexing is the simplest way to increase the number of channels. Of course you have to increase the bit rate, and therefore the carrier frequency; so to carry 100 channels of 8Mb/s, you need a carrier frequency of 1.6GHz. Power lines were never meant to deal with that!
All this RF energy being radiated from power lines is going to play havoc with radios, TVs, mobile phones, two-way radios (as used by the energency services) and all manner of electronic apparatus. Including landline telephony and other broadband users.
That is just how it is, and Mother Nature won't listen to any amount of smarm, spin or bribery.