crtl2
| Broadband over power lines another choice for high-speed Internet access
Knight Ridder - Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Knight Ridder Newspapers
By Akweli Parker
PHILADELPHIA _ In most areas, getting fast Internet access at home means choosing between cable modems and DSL service.
Now, consumers in a few markets can add "BPL" to that list.
BPL stands for broadband over power lines, which provides Internet speeds comparable to the phone company's digital subscriber lines, but uses the electric utility grid instead of phone or cable-TV lines to carry the Internet signals.
"We believe the technology is there and the pricing is right," said Joe Balaban, a spokesman for Pittsburgh utility Duquesne Light Co. and its BPL subsidiary, Duquesne Broadband.
So far, there are more than 40 deployments of BPL technology nationwide _ mostly trials, but also a handful of fully commercial systems, according to the United Power Line Council.
Duquesne's premium offering, launched in August, provides download speeds up to 3 megabits a second for $30 a month _ $13 less than Comcast Corp.'s 6-megabit cable-modem offering, and equivalent to the price of Verizon Communications Inc.'s 3-megabit DSL service.
A cheaper but slower option from Duquesne costs $20 a month.
Currently, Duquesne is offering BPL only to about 2,800 people through a small pilot program in the Pittsburgh suburb of Monroeville.
"We've had zero problems with it," said Steve Reese, a Monroeville, Pa., resident and one of Duquesne Broadband's first customers. "It's fast. It's never kicked us off. It's been fantastic."
Reese, a schoolteacher, said the service helped him do research he could not do at work, since computers there often were occupied or performed erratically.
The closest utility to the Philadelphia region now providing broadband over power lines is Allentown-based PPL Broadband, a subsidiary of PPL Corp. It has limited the service to five relatively small areas, and several hundred customers have signed up. The price ranges from $35 to $40 monthly for service up to 1.5 megabits per second, with the more expensive offering including e-mail and Web hosting.
Exelon Corp., of Chicago, which is the parent of Peco Energy Co. and is acquiring New Jersey's Public Service Enterprise Group Inc., said it had no plans to offer such service in the near future, but it said it was closely watching developments in the technology.
"We might certainly consider a pilot at one point but aren't at that stage now," said Dan Hill, senior vice president and chief technology officer for Exelon. "We're just being very careful with understanding the business model. ... There certainly have been some interesting advances in the technology."
Utilities differ in the way they provide broadband over power lines, but it basically works like this: At one site, the utility has a connection to the Internet backbone, and computers that convert Internet traffic into signals of a frequency that can be carried by power lines into customers' neighborhoods.
As for getting that signal over the normally expensive and tricky "last mile" into a customer's home, the power company typically uses a relatively cheap and simple method of entry: "Wi-Fi" technology that beams the signal from the utility pole into the house. In dwellings where Wi-Fi might not reach, such as apartment buildings, the signals can travel through the building's existing electrical wiring and wall outlets to the customer's computer, given the right equipment.
One obstacle is that sending Internet signals through power lines can interfere with low-power radio transmissions, including those of amateur radio operators.
"Ham radio operators are not against BPL," said Alan Pitts, a spokesman for ARRL, the national association for Amateur Radio.
"We are against the interference. When you go putting energy in those frequencies on unshielded electric lines, it will turn those lines into an antenna."
This is a public safety issue, Pitts said, because the hams _ who number nearly 670,000 in the United States _ "come through regularly when nothing else works" to coordinate emergency responders and relief efforts.
PPL said that while it had experienced a few incidents with ham radio operators, the problems were solved by "notching," or reserving chunks of the radio spectrum for the hobbyists. The utility said it had no reported problems with fire, police or rescue radio systems.
In some cases, PPL says it has traced reported interference to sources other than power-line broadband. When one man complained of interference, "we found out it was his Ionic Breeze air cleaner in his house," said Alan Richenbacher, chief network architect for PPL Broadband.
Still, amateur radio operators say there is evidence that Internet signals, when carried as radio frequencies over medium-voltage power lines, can disrupt other radio signals a half mile or more away. They complain that the Federal Communications Commission, by failing to take stronger action regarding BPL, "broke its own prime directive ... to protect the licensed services from interference," Pitts said.
Not so, countered Bruce Franca, acting chief for the FCC's office of engineering and technology.
"We amended our rules to put many more requirements on broadband over power lines," he said.
"The president has made the provision of broadband services to the American public a national priority," Franca said. "So we're looking for ways to provide broadband to the American people, and the more ways you can do it, the more beneficial. We weigh that against the impact on licensed radio services."
One encouraging sign for ham operators, Pitts said, was Motorola Inc.'s rollout this year of a BPL method that avoids interference by combining low-voltage lines with frequency notching.
Some quarters of the investing community think broadband over power lines is a potentially profitable gamble.
Google Inc., which operates the Internet's most-used search engine, in July invested $100 million in BPL operator Current Communications Group L.L.C., of Germantown, Md. Also, PA Early Stage Partners and other investors recently invested $1 million in Duquesne Broadband's co-owner, Pittsburgh-based BPL Global Ltd.
Michael Bolton, PA early stage managing director, said the technology's potential went far beyond Internet access. Other potential applications include remote building management, which could give companies huge energy savings; "smart grid" capabilities that save time and money on diagnosing needed power line repairs; and security solutions using broadband.
"This is a $300 billion market opportunity over the next 10 years," Bolton said.
Michael Cai, a senior analyst with Dallas research firm Parks Associates, does not expect broadband over power lines to take much business away from DSL and cable modems, which have become well-entrenched in many high-population areas. "It's best positioned in the underserved markets," Cai said of BPL.
Plus, with prices for lower-speed DSL access beginning to drop below $15 a month in many areas, BPL operators may have a harder time carving a niche in those places. Price, after all, was what drew Duquesne customer Reese to the power-line technology.
"Forty dollars a month is really a lot of money," Reese said. "At $19.99 _ that's a lot more doable."
|
