Electric grids may become the next providers of
broadband Internet access.
Once Lynn Huffman lifted his new modem out of the
box, it took less than a minute to get online at the computer he
keeps in the den. And it took just a few minutes more for
Huffman, a retired great-grandpa who recently discovered e-mail,
to decide that his new high-speed Internet service was fast,
simple to set up and, best of all, cheap. At $26.95 a month, it
beats the $42.95 a month he would have had to pay to get
broadband from his cable company.
But here's the real shocker: Huffman taps into
his new fast pipe through a wall socket — any old socket in the
house will do. "Now if I could just figure out a way to get rid
of all these pop-up ads," he says, settling down to clean the
spam out of his In box.
The folks who freed Huffman from his old dial-up
connection — the one that hogged his phone line while he was
online to check sports scores or read the news — work for the
publicly owned utility of the city of Manassas, Va. They are the
people who make sure that the 15,000 homes and businesses in
this quiet suburb 30 miles southwest of Washington have
electricity, water and sewer service. They were never interested
in getting into the broadband business — in fact, officials are
keen to franchise the operation to an outside investor — but
that's exactly what they did when they deployed broadband over
power lines, or BPL, on the Manassas grid earlier this year and
made accessing big bandwidth as easy as plugging in a toaster.
The concept of transmitting data across a power
grid isn't new, but until recently the technology could handle
only tiny streams — enough to monitor a few substations but not
enough to support high-speed surfing by multiple users. Now new
modems and other advances are prompting dozens of utilities
around the country to start testing BPL in earnest. Manassas was
first out of the gate with Zplug, its commercial service, but
others aren't far behind. Cinergy, a utility based in
Cincinnati, Ohio, started enrolling BPL customers in late April;
the service should be available to 50,000 Ohio homes by year
end. Progress Energy has a commercial trial under way in North
Carolina with Internet service provider EarthLink as its
partner. Idacomm, a subsidiary of Idacorp (which also owns Idaho
Power), hopes to be live in Boise and a few other markets by
next spring. "The BPL market," Idacomm president and CEO Chris
Britton says, "is going to be hot."
These days most broadband subscribers use either
a modem from their cable company or a digital subscriber line
(DSL) from their phone company. The first wave of BPL roll-outs
doesn't pose much of a threat to the Comcasts and Verizons of
the industry, which boast millions of customers and have been
selling high-speed access since the late '90s. Some 22 million
U.S. households already subscribe to a broadband service,
according to Forrester Research analyst Jed Kolko, making it one
of the biggest hits of the digital age.
But a huge chunk of the market is still up for
grabs: namely, the 40 million-plus homes using dial-up to
connect. For some of these users, a 56K modem is plenty. But
budding BPL providers are betting that a significant number of
consumers really do want broadband service but are simply
holding out for a better offer.
BPL could very well win them over. For one thing,
it truly is plug-and-play. Plug the modem into an electrical
outlet, and you're online. The connection speeds are likely to
be slower than the typical cable-modem setup (which clocks in at
1 mbps or faster), but they are comparable to most DSL services,
which tend to run at about 500 kbps (10 times as fast as
dial-up). And BPL is a symmetrical service, meaning it's just as
fast sending out digital photos and other fat files as it is
bringing them in; cable and DSL services are typically much
slower on the upstream.
BPL is a relative bargain because utilities can
make the technology work using their existing infrastructure —
lines that already reach virtually every home in America.
There's no need to make major capital improvements in order to
launch, so they can charge less and still turn a profit.
Providers say they will price BPL service to be competitive with
DSL: about $30 to $40 a month. Cable-modem service is often more
expensive (and practically exorbitant if you don't have cable
TV).
How does BPL work? The data signals that travel
between the computer and outer cyberspace basically hitch a ride
across the city's network of power lines. There's no
interference because electrical current and digital 1s and 0s
run at different frequencies. Manassas uses a fiber-optic
network to carry data from its central Internet servers to the
medium-voltage lines that run underground or overhead along
residential streets. Special hardware clamped to every
transformer helps the Internet signal jump to the low-voltage
lines that disappear inside individual homes.
For many utilities getting into this business,
broadband is just the beginning. Power lines equipped to receive
data can also carry voice traffic, and with time — and the right
compression technology — they will be able to carry video too.
Electric companies could be the next contender in an extended
battle to control not just high-speed surfing but all forms of
digital communication and entertainment for the home. Comcast,
Cablevision and others already offer multiple services. Idacomm
says it plans to offer Internet phone service and
video-on-demand to BPL users right off the bat. "That's the
triple play," says Vamsi Sistla, broadband analyst for ABI
Research. "That's what every network that's sending data is
striving for. And [consumers] who can get the apple, the orange
and the banana from the same vendor will get a better deal."
