CABL Forum - Re: Internet through electrical power network???

Here is an article by: Dan Orzech 10/20/2005
It touches on some issues and potentials of that technology.

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After years of hype, connecting to the internet over electrical power lines may finally be coming true.

In Cincinnati and surrounding areas, more than 50,000 homes are connecting to the web through power lines. Recently, Manassas, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., became the first city in the nation to offer all its citizens the option of going online over the power network.

First hyped in the mid- to late-'90s, broadband over power line, or BPL, is currently enjoying a big wave of renewed interest.

IBM and CenterPoint Energy, a Texas utility, tested the technology in the Houston area this summer. Earlier this year Google, Goldman Sachs and Hearst jointly invested a reported $100 million into Current Technologies, which is providing BPL in the Cincinnati area together with Midwest utility Cinergy.

Mega-ISP EarthLink is experimenting with it. The company is setting up a small trial in Manhattan offering internet telephone service over BPL, potentially allowing customers to eliminate phone lines into the house.

"We're excited about BPL," said Dan Greenfield, Earthlink's vice president of corporate communications. "And we're seeing both the technology and the economics continuing to improve. We believe that in time it has potential to serve as a third pipe into the home, in addition to DSL and cable."

In Manassas, 700 households are already using BPL, and another 500 customers have signed up for the service, according to the provider, Chantilly, Virginia-based Communication Technologies. The company shares revenue from the service with the city of Manassas, which owns the electric utility.

Customers plug a BPL modem into any electrical wall socket, and send data over the city's electrical wires to substations. The substations are connected to the net by city-owned fiber-optic cables. Because the data travels at higher frequencies than electrical current, the two do not interfere with each other.

But that doesn't mean internet traffic doesn't interfere with other signals. BPL faces continuing criticism that transmitting data over unshielded power lines can interfere with both ham radio broadcasts and police and fire radios.

That's one of the issues that has slowed BPL adoption, said Joe Laszlo, research director at Jupiter Research who covers broadband.

A number of BPL trials around the country "have been canceled or scaled back because of interference issues," he said, "or because the cost of deploying was much higher than the utilities expected."

While DSL and cable have a significant lead on BPL, Laszlo said there's still plenty of room in the market for more players. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. households use dialup connections or are not online at all.

"More competition in the market would benefit consumers and almost certainly lead to faster adoption of broadband," he said.

Utilities are interested in BPL not only because it offers a new revenue stream, but because it can add intelligence to their networks, allowing them to track power failures more rapidly.

While a growing number of utilities are looking at BPL, said Laszlo, they're also beginning to realize that the best approach for offering their customers broadband access may involve a mix of technologies.

"BPL isn't necessarily an ideal end-to-end solution," he said, "but one that can play a role along with technologies like wireless and fiber optics to bridge the last mile."

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Re: Internet through electrical power network???