Utilities Exploring Broadband Via Power Outlets

Utilities Exploring Broadband Via Power Outlets

By Michael Bazeley, San Jose Mercury News, Calif. -- Mar. 28

The humble electrical outlet is getting an upgrade.

If a growing number of electric utilities get their way, people will soon view the ubiquitous wall jack as their high-speed gateway to the Internet. Power companies from San Francisco to North Carolina are exploring how to carry broadband Internet signals over their power lines.

Several companies have launched trial programs in the past year, and many more are watching intently from the sidelines. One recent industry survey found that a third of electric utilities were either using broadband-over-powerline technology, known as BPL, or considering it.

Some utilities -- such as Pacific Gas and Electric -- see an opportunity to steal customers from cable and telephone companies, which provide most broadband hookups.

"You have to at least demonstrate a significant cost-savings over DSL, and I think we can do that," said Toby Tyler, director of telecommunications business development for the PG&E. "We're taking a very hard look at it."

A trial could start this year. If PG&E moves ahead, it would probably sell the service through an Internet provider such as EarthLink, instead of directly to its customers.

Other utilities see possible profits in the hundreds of thousands of U.S. homes not served by either cable broadband or DSL -- some in the Bay Area.

Progress Energy in North Carolina and EarthLink recently launched a trial program with 500 homes. Although the test homes are in areas already served by other broadband technologies, company officials see their market as smaller areas with no high-speed Internet access.

"And these are not small, isolated areas," said Matt Oja, director of emerging technologies at Progress Energy. "These are 5,000- and 10,000-people cities and towns, so the opportunity could be significant."

Though it sounds exotic, the technology to move digital signals through power lines has existed for years. But technical hurdles have slowed adoption. High-voltage power lines are hostile to broadband signals. And pushing the signal through transformers, which reduce electrical voltage so it is safe for homes, has proved difficult. But now engineers are figuring out how to bypass the transformers completely.

The advantages are many. Unlike cable or even telephone service, virtually every U.S. home and business is connected to an electrical grid. And power lines generally can offer faster uploads and downloads.

PG&E has logged speeds as fast as 54 megabits a second in tests, more than 15 times faster than the speediest cable modem service.

So far, early reviews have been positive.

Cinergy Broadband, a division of the Midwest utility with the same name, has been testing BPL with 100 users in the Cincinnati area for about year. The trial went well enough that the company announced a larger-scale rollout March 2.

Timothy Barhorst of Cincinnati was one of the original testers. He says he gets speeds of up to four megabits per second, or slightly faster than a cable modem.

"It's very easy to install," said Barhorst, an information technology consultant. "You plug the modem into the wall and the computer into the modem. It's been surprisingly reliable. I've had few outages."

Unlike in Cincinnati, where the broadband signal rides into the home on electrical wires, North Carolina's Progress Energy carries the signal into a neighborhood on power lines and then uses WiFi transmitters mounted on telephone poles to shoot it into homes.

Bud Howard, a Web developer in the town of Fuquay-Varina, said the service is comparable to that provided by his Time Warner cable modem.

Howard said the service has been problem-free so far, but he's not sure whether the price -- $39.95 a month, or just $2 less than what he was paying before -- will entice many people to switch. His view could change if Progress moves to a faster WiFi standard, as expected, boosting speeds to five times what they are now.

Californians will have to wait, if they get BPL at all. PG&E is in the early stages of testing and still has not yet decided whether to embrace the technology for consumers, though it will probably use it for internal operations.

Southern California Edison, the electric utility for much of Southern California, is sitting on the sidelines for now.

"It faces numerous challenges before it's viable," said Solomon Tessema, who heads up telecommunications for the utility. "At this point, the expected revenue is very small. Whether this works on a large scale remains to be seen."

Many analysts are dismissive of the technology, which they say does not offer distinct advantages over cable or DSL.

Amateur radio operators -- typically hobbyists who use short-wave radios to talk to each other -- are particularly critical of the technology, which they say interferes with their transmissions. In February, the Federal Communications Commission promised to investigate the issue.

At the time, some commissioners hailed BPL as a great hope for areas that are starved for broadband access.

"We need to push the boundaries to accommodate new technologies," Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said.

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