policy-ham wrote:

Electric lines and gas pipes will carry Internet to Illinois town
By Jon Van
Tribune staff reporter

November 26, 2005

PRINCETON, Ill. -- Starting in December this town of 7,500 will begin
offering high-speed Internet service over the electrical lines that
power the city.

It is among a handful of communities nationwide to plunge into a new
technology called broadband over power lines, or BPL, that competes
with Internet connections provided by telephone and cable TV operators.
Combined with wireless technologies, broadband service delivered over
power lines--and perhaps one day even through natural gas
pipelines--raises the likelihood that going online anywhere at any time
for very low cost will soon be a reality.

The Princeton service, which began testing this spring, is being
watched by small communities across Illinois. One member of the
Illinois Commerce Commission hopes other towns will experiment with BPL
to spread Internet connectivity and drive down costs.

About 15 customers are served by Princeton's BPL test deployment, which
demonstrates the service is robust and works well, said Jason Bird,
superintendent of Princeton's municipal electric utility.

"From the utility's standpoint, this hasn't been difficult," he said.
"The equipment is similar to what we work with every day."

Customers seem to like the service, especially the in-house portability
BPL offers. A computer can move from one room to another and go online
simply by plugging its modem into any electrical outlet in the house.

"I'm much more active on the Interent now because the speed is much
better than with dial-up," said Leslie Lund, who began using BPL in
March. "I don't get interference, even when my husband uses his power
tools."

The electric line connections get their Internet signals from a 12-mile
loop of fiber that Princeton installed last year as a means of
attracting industrial development. After one factory left town in 2003
and the manager of another complained about the town's lack of advanced
communications infrastructure, the city decided it needed fiber, said
Mayor Keith Cain.

"We already had our own electric utility, so that gave us a real
advantage," he said. Since the city installed fiber and started testing
BPL the local cable and phone operators upgraded their systems and cut
service rates, he said.

One downside to Princeton's BPL experience has been an inability to get
enough equipment to begin the commercial rollout sooner, Cain said. The
town's BPL vendor ran into financial difficulty and stopped producing
equipment while it went into reorganization.

Under new ownership, the vendor now says it can ship the products
needed for the rollout, said Steve Brust, vice president of Connecting
Point Community Centers, the Internet service provider that manages
Princeton's broadband service.

"The equipment works fine, but it's proprietary," Brust said. "There
are a lot of companies in BPL right now, but there are no standards and
no one company dominates the market."

Lack of standards is common with any new technology, said Raymond
Blair, vice president for BPL initiatives for IBM Corp. Broadband
technologies like Wi-Fi that are based on standards enjoy popularity
because the equipment is interoperable and less expensive than
proprietary systems.

At least three industry-based committees are working toward BPL
standardization, Blair said. The emerging industry should benefit from
their work within a year or two, he said.

"The best case for BPL right now lies in creating a smart electrical
grid," Blair said. Utilities can spot trouble, read meters, improve
efficiencies and generally boost reliability once they install fiber to
monitor their grids, he said.

Once BPL standards are in place, equipment costs will drop, making a
stronger economic case for offering high-speed Internet to residences,
Blair said.

Robert Lieberman, a member of the Illinois Commerce Commission, said
the state has $5 million it will award to projects intended to extend
Internet connectivity.

There will be another $5 million available next year, and he hopes that
some BPL projects will receive a portion of that Digital Divide
infrastructure funding.

Also, Lieberman said, the ICC and state lawmakers need to provide
incentives to electric utilities to install smart grid equipment that
makes BPL to residential customers possible. Texas lawmakers recently
adopted such incentives, and legislators in New York are considering
doing so, he said.

Power lines aren't the Internet's only new avenue into homes. There's
also interest in using natural gas pipelines.

Broadband in gas, or BiG, has been proven to work in concept, although
field trials haven't yet been launched, said George West, a senior
analyst with West Technology Research Solutions, a market research firm
based in Mountain View, Calif.

BiG would rely upon ultra-wideband radio waves traveling through gas
pipes to bring Internet to customers. The Federal Communications
Commission approved ultra-wideband applications a few years ago but
requires they operate at very low power to avoid interference with
wireless phones and other appliances.

Pumping ultra-wideband signals along gas lines buried underground would
shield them from interference, enabling them to operate at higher
power, West said. "BiG has the potential to serve 18 million homes by
2010."

The ICC's Lieberman said he is intrigued by BiG.

"I'd love to see a project with People's Gas or Nicor to test this," he
said. "My theory is the more pipes you have to bring the Internet to
customers, the better for everyone."


BiG? That would be quite a trick around here. Everyone has to use
Propane because there is no underground distribution system.


I saw a recent news story where BPL was shut down in one city because
of technical problems were costing more than they could expect to
recover and that the system was being dismantled.
--
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Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida