RadioBanter - BPL problems in Manassas

"yea right" wrote in message
...

The website is down. Can you post the article?

Here's the printer freindly version, which should load quicker:

http://tinyurl.com/2xg6j

"Manassas put itself on the national map this year when it became the first
city in the country to implement broadband over powerline Internet service
citywide."

"But the city and BPL franchisee Prospect Street Broadband mutually agreed
recently to terminate their contract."

"Manassas officials will open bids at a public meeting on Monday from
prospective new franchisees."

It's not clear just what the problems are, but the article says:

"Although no single issue broke the deal, Todd said, an example of those
differing needs included the city's desire to have a local customer service
center, and Prospect's desire to do that work from afar."

What does that mean? Might the town officials have thought BPL would create
some permanent jobs in Manassas or something? Something to do for their
soon-to-be obselete meter readers, maybe?

I found this line to be interesting:

"So far, 200 homes in Manassas use the $26.95 per month service, which
allows subscribers to access the Internet by plugging a modem into any city
outlet."

BPL only has 200 subscribers since they started last year? Why? Nearly all
the "infrastructure", such as it is, is already in place.

This is very different from the optimistic press release derived
"journalism" in an article dated September 22, 2003 :

http://www.appanet.org/legislativere...powerlines.cfm

" But "the thing is, it works. That's the bottom line," said Manager of
Energy Services Brett Massey, one of the project leaders along with
Assistant Electric Director John Hewa. "

There's several more cheerful quotes in the article about wonderful BPL.

And Manassas' BPL system was to be going full steam by now:

"Rolling the system out to cover the entire city (population 35,000, with
2,500 commercial/industrial meters and 12,500 residential) should take about
120 days, the utility estimates."

Here's my favorite quote from the Public Power Weekly article:

"WiFi (wireless Internet service) might be a little bit cheaper, Todd said.
But the BPL system doesn't present the security concerns of a WiFi system
and does provide the major benefit of a distribution-level outage
notification system. "

WiFi "might" be cheaper? Well, I guess the benefits of continual checking
for power failures makes up for that, at least for the power company.

Frank Dresser