W1RFI
join:2003-05-12
Burlington, CT | Explosion? DSLReports ran an article that cited 2004, 2005, 2006 and then 2007 as "the year of BPL." How much progress this industry is making is a matter of interpretation.
According to the FCC's latest report on broadband, BPL enjoys 0.008% of the broadband lines in the country. According to the industry BPL database, BPL is installed or planned in 150 ZIP codes (out of a total of approximately 25,000 non-business ZIP codes in the US), or about 0.006% of ZIP codes. And the majority of those are either very small trials (a few miles of line at most) or not yet fully operational. I know personally that there are far more Houston ZIP codes planned than yet installed, for example. And at least a few entries in the database do not appear to exist at all (attracting venture capital?)
The 2007 United Power Line Council map of BPL deployments has far fewer entries than the 2006 map did.
An article that cites this as an explosion is an embarrassment to its publisher, IMHO. It is pretty clear that they ran the article based only on the BPL-media-PR hype they were provided.
On the other hand, TXU does plan to continue their deployment and as many as 2,000,000 homes and businesses in the Houston area may have access to access BPL over the coming years. The "take" rate in other areas appears to be somewhere between 5% and 10%, by anyone's best estimates. Current steadfastedly chooses not to release any figures of how many customers are choosing BPL in their Cincinnati deployment. (From what I have seen, the customers who do take it seem satisfied with its performance, btw, not something I can say about other BPL companies.)
Ed Hare |
