A new lane for the highway – Some utilities offer power lines to transmit digital signals

Dan Niswonger zips along the Internet on a digital highway that most folks can’t travel — yet.

Though telephone lines or cable wires carry most high-speed signals today, Niswonger and 50 of his neighbors in Cape Girardeau, Mo., are testing a new technology: They hook into the Internet using the same electrical outlet that powers televisions, toasters and lamps.

Jack Naudi
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

http://www.spokesmanreview.com/allstories-news-story.asp?date=032804&ID=s1503360

And their Internet signal is carried along power lines owned by AmerenUE, a St. Louis-based electric utility.

I can’t quite comprehend that something that will kill you when you put your finger into it can get a signal into the Internet,” Niswonger said.

With the exception of a couple of small cities, broadband over power lines, or BPL, remains an almost unheard-of concept in the United States. But after 18 months of testing, AmerenUE’s parent company, Ameren Corp., is optimistic about the system.

“The technology has proven it works at a pretty decent scale,” said Steve Kidwell, manager of business improvement for Ameren.

Niswonger goes further: “It has been fantastic.”

It also has been a long time in coming. Utilities have known for a while that digital signals can piggyback on the same lines that carry electrons.

But movement is the easy part. What’s more troublesome is keeping electrical interference from turning high-speed digital signals into indecipherable, scrambled messes.

In recent years, several companies have devised software and hardware to keep those things intact. With each tweak, the interference has been reduced, and Internet connections are getting faster and faster.

Today, the average Cape Girardeau test customer can download images, video and data from the Internet at about the same speed as service over digital subscriber lines, offered by telephone companies.

BPL soon could rival the top speed offered by cable broadband systems, about four times as fast as DSL. In theory, Kidwell said, power-line Internet connections have no maximum speed.

Power lines have another advantage: They’re everywhere. Many sections of the country can’t get DSL service from telephone companies or high-speed Internet connections through cable-television wires. But virtually every home or business in the nation is tied into the electric power grid.

“I get calls from people every day saying, `When can I have it?”’ said Alan Shark, president of the Power Line Communications Association, a trade group promoting BPL technology.

Eager to get high-speed Internet availability into as many homes as possible, the Federal Communications Commission has been pushing the power-line access. Last month, it released a proposed set of rules designed to allow utilities to begin rolling out the system virtually anywhere in the United States.

In a statement, FCC Chairman Michael Powell hailed the coming of “another broadband pipe” to compete with DSL and cable.

Despite the FCC’s endorsement and support, “Utilities have been extremely conservative and extremely cautious,” Shark said.

“I cannot get an executive (from the utilities) to my meetings, because they say, ‘Our job is a utility,”’ Shark said. “They are spending their time worrying about the core business.”

The city of Manassas, Va., which operates a municipal electric company, soon will roll out BPL service citywide. But most for-profit monopoly utilities are sitting on the sidelines, leaving Ameren virtually alone in the field.

Ameren is expected to end the Cape Girardeau test in a month or two. It plans to start rolling out access to an undisclosed broader area shortly afterward.

It’s likely, Kidwell said, that Ameren would work with partners. For example, the utility might lease its lines to another company that would sell broadband service into a particular market.

In fact, even for the small test in Cape Girardeau, Ameren has a partner, Big River Telephone Co., which serves southeast Missouri. Big River essentially provides the customer support, technical assistance and a link from the Internet’s framework, known as its backbone, to Ameren’s power lines.

Big River also provides a connection from the Internet backbone to the power lines and the servers that allow customers to have e-mail. The company hopes the partnership will expand after the test phase.

“Our experience has been good, and I think Ameren has been happy with the service,” said Jerry Howe, Big River’s chief executive.

Big River does not offer DSL, so broadband over power lines would be the company’s first offering of high-speed Internet access.

Perhaps the biggest concern by Ameren and Big River is that they could be too far ahead. A wary public might be reluctant to buy into a new technology.

“You don’t want to be out there too far in advance,” Howe said. “But we have had this technology deployed for 18 months. It’s not like we’re putting it out with no experience.”

Big River and Ameren have discussed pricing for the service, but they aren’t revealing numbers. “The price will be competitive with cable and DSL,” Howe said.

That would put the cost to customers at about $30 to $40 a month.

As a tester, Niswonger has been involved in pricing discussions. “I’m not at liberty to talk about it,” he said. “But I’ll tell you one thing, the cable company is going to have a fight on their hands.

“I think it’s going to take off. It’s going to be a monster.”