Powering up a new kind of broadband

It still registers barely a blip on the broadband radar screen. But momentum is starting to build behind broadband over powerline as a viable high-speed Internet access alternative.

In the past three months a handful of significant events have occurred:

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It still registers barely a blip on the broadband radar screen. But momentum is starting to build behind broadband over powerline as a viable high-speed Internet access alternative.

In the past three months a handful of significant events have occurred:

• A $100 million investment in Current Communications, a Cincinnati BPL service provider, by Google and others.
  
  

• IBM's participation in a pilot project with CenterPoint Energy to offer BPL service to 220 homes in the Houston area.
  
  

• And work within the IEEE to create a standard - called P1901 - to define an efficient BPL channel over AC power lines. The standard is targeted for completion in early 2007.
  
  

These developments follow a ruling by the FCC designed to limit interference to other radio frequency devices. The FCC's action requires BPL providers to employ devices that can switch frequencies if they cause interference and that can be shut down remotely.

FCC commissioners also will require a national database of BPL installations for public safety agencies, amateur radio operators and others.

Taken together, these developments could help drive a compound annual growth rate in BPL revenue of 90% over the next seven years, according to Telecom Trends International. The market watcher says BPL revenue is expected to grow from $57 million in 2004 to $4.4 billion in 2011.

There are 40 BPL deployments across the country in various stages of trials and commercial service, according to the United Power Line Council (UPLC). The largest deployment is in Cincinnati, where BPL service from Cinergy passes 50,000 homes, according to UPLC.

First-generation equipment can produce throughputs up to 45M bit/sec but service speeds range from 500K to 3M bit/sec, which is comparable to DSL. Second-generation equipment will produce throughput up to 200M bit/sec, according to the UPLC.

Yet BPL currently accounted for less than 2% of the 38 million 200K bit/sec-and-above wireline broadband access lines installed in the U.S. in 2004, according to the FCC. And significant business and technical issues remain for the technology.

BPL advocates have been hard-pressed to mold a viable business model - one that can deliver the throughput and QoS users expect while driving profits for utilities and other service providers.

And amateur radio operators still assert that, despite the actions of the FCC, BPL interferes not only with their transmissions but also air traffic control and other emergency communications services.

"As soon as you put those kinds of frequencies on there, the wire turns into an antenna," says Allen Pitts, a spokesman for the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), the national association for Amateur Radio. "It both receives and transmits."

Interference issues

There have been recent BPL product developments to mitigate interference issues. Pitts noted Motorola as one vendor that had developed a low-voltage system designed to reduce high-frequency interference with radio transmission through radio frequency notch filtering.