fyi Last year: (SDG&E) San Diego Gas & Electric Company Selects Ambient Corporation to Assess BPL Technology
Reuters Key Development - 21 Jul 2005
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California OKs power-line broadband tests !!!
Updated: 7:02 p.m. ET April 27, 2006
SAN FRANCISCO - The California Public Utilities Commission approved a plan Thursday allowing providers of high-speed Internet services to test electricity lines to deliver online access throughout the state.
CPUC commissioner Rachelle Chong, who drafted the plan, said broadband over power lines, or BPL, could become a new competitor to Internet services delivered via telephone, cable and satellites and help reduce prices for consumers.
BPL uses existing utility lines delivering power to neighborhoods to carry broadband signals into homes.
It has been touted by equipment makers and regulators as a possible competitor to cable and telecommunications services, which handle almost all of the roughly 40 million U.S. residential broadband connections.
BPL technology also could allow utilities to develop so-called smart grid applications to more actively monitor and manage the distribution of electricity, said Chong, a former member of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.
Until recently, U.S. utilities interested in BPL have faced various financial and technical problems. The signals that carry data over electrical lines can cause interference with radio equipment and can travel only a short distance before weakening, requiring repeaters in many areas.
Nevertheless, utilities such as TXU Corp. , Texas’s largest utility, and Cinergy Corp. in Ohio are testing the service with privately held BPL provider Current Communications Group, of Germantown, Maryland.
The company also is working on early trials with two California utilities — Edison International’s Southern California Edison subsidiary and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, a municipally-owned utility.
Those projects involve both smart grid applications and BPL Internet services to homes, said Jim Dondero, vice president of marketing at Current Communications.
The regulatory commission adopted guidelines for electric utilities and companies that wish to develop and test projects in California.
The commission turned down an alternative plan that proposed some slightly different regulations.
Among the adopted guidelines, electric utility affiliates and other developers can invest in and operate BPL systems.
Utility affiliates would have to follow CPUC rules for transactions between a utility and a BPL affiliate to protect against cross-subsidies, the commission said.
Companies installing BPL equipment on utility poles also would have to pay a fee for the attachments.
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Hurdles cleared for delivering broadband over power lines
ReplyDeleteBy Jessie Seyfer
Mercury News
Three main wires feed into most California homes -- cable, phone and electricity.
While cable and phone lines have brought the Internet to residents for years, on Thursday state regulators cleared a path for electrical lines to do the same one day.
Broadband over power lines, or BPL, is a fledgling technology that sends data over wires without interfering with electricity flows. But BPL presents a regulatory dilemma as it's both an electrical and a communications service. With its legal status unclear, companies have been slow to develop BPL services.
So to spur BPL on, the California Public Utilities Commission voted Thursday to reduce the number of regulatory hurdles companies must clear to experiment with the technology.
``BPL can provide Californians with a new broadband pipe to the home,'' said Commissioner Rachelle Chong, who wrote the new guidelines which were adopted by a 4-1 vote. ``More broadband competition will bring benefits to Californians. Thus, this . . . decision is pro-consumer in the most fundamental ways. It will introduce a new competitor, which in turns helps drive broadband prices down.''
The dissenter was commissioner Geoffrey Brown, who favored more stringent regulations.
Utility companies are the gatekeepers for any experiments that BPL companies conduct on their lines. Companies that run tests do not necessarily have to be utilities -- a broadband provider such as the Google-backed Current Communications Group, of Maryland -- could test a BPL service.
The rules adopted Thursday require less PUC oversight for agreements that BPL companies strike with utilities to access their power lines.
If a utility company decides to conduct its own BPL trials, the guidelines call for such experiments not to be funded with money collected from utility rate-payers.
The rules acknowledge that BPL is in such an early stage of development that it wouldn't be fair for rate-payers to fund something so unproven.
Utility companies praised the decision.
``We think it does a good job of helping encourage utility participation in BPL,'' said John Nelson, a spokesman for PG&E, which is not currently conducting any trials but is interested in the technology.
San Diego Gas & Electric is conducting the only BPL trial in the state.
``The commission's actions create a very favorable climate for the development of BPL in California,'' said SDG&E spokesman Eddie Van Herik.
Cable and phone companies could suffer if a technology like BPL succeeds, but AT&T spokesman John Britton said his company felt it was serving customers well.
``AT&T shares the commission's goal of expanding broadband access and consumer choice,'' he said. ``Customers tell us they're very satisfied with AT&T-Yahoo Internet service.''
Comcast spokesman Andrew Johnson said, ``Obviously this is a very crowded field with lots of competitors. This would just be one more competitor.''
Yet for all its promise, BPL presents some major technological problems.
For one thing, it's slow. Present technology allows it to run about as fast as DSL at its slowest, said Juan Fernandez, an analyst with Gartner. High-end DSL and cable services are five to eight times faster.
As part of the commission's ruling, a BPL company would be responsible costs associated with adding equipment to poles.
BPL Internet signals take the form of invisible, wireless radio impulses that piggyback on the electrical wires. The radio impulses leak off the power lines and interfere with nearby radio signals.
It's also unlikely that BPL will end up being the solution to providing broadband to communities where there's no DSL or cable-modem service. That's because it's not as simple as plugging a computer into the socket, Fernandez said. To get BPL out to rural areas, a significant amount of equipment needs to be installed on the lines.
``You need some subscriber density to make it cost-effective,'' he said. ``It's not really the kind of thing for farms.''
Calif. agency OKs broadband via power lines test
ReplyDeleteThu Apr 27, 2006 2:32pm ET
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The California Public Utilities Commission approved a plan on Thursday allowing providers of high-speed Internet services to test using electricity lines to deliver online access throughout the state.
CPUC commissioner Rachelle Chong, who drafted the plan, said broadband over power lines, or BPL, could become a new competitor to Internet services delivered via telephone, cable and satellites and help reduce prices for consumers.
BPL uses existing utility lines delivering power to neighborhoods to carry broadband signals into homes.
It has been touted by equipment makers and regulators as a possible competitor to cable and telecommunications services, which handle almost all of the roughly 40 million U.S. residential broadband connections.
The regulatory commission adopted guidelines for electric utilities and companies that wish to develop and test projects in California.
Among the guidelines, electric utility affiliates and other developers can invest in and operate BPL systems.
Utility affiliates would have to follow CPUC rules for transactions between a utility and a BPL affiliate to protect against cross-subsidies, the commission said.
Calif. regulators OK broadband over power line test
ReplyDeleteBy Marguerite Reardon
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: April 27, 2006, 3:18 PM PDT
Broadband service providers got the green light from the California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday to test broadband over power line (BPL) technology, paving the way for a third option in the high-speed Internet market.
The technology known as BPL uses the existing utility lines that deliver power to carry broadband signals into the home. For years, people have hoped BPL would allow electric companies to become a viable third alternative to the cable and telephone companies providing high-speed access to the Internet.
But technical limitations and a bad habit of interfering with local emergency radios have made BPL a tantalizing near-miss for the tech industry.
Nevertheless, several utilities across the country are looking into deploying BPL, and several big technology companies, such as Google, IBM and EarthLink, are investing in the technology.
Last year, Google invested in a service provider called Current Communications Group, which is testing broadband over power line networks in Ohio and Texas. And IBM is partnering with Houston-based power utility CenterPoint Energy to build a BPL network.
EarthLink has tested broadband over power line services with several power companies including Duke Power in Charlotte, N.C., Progress Energy in Raleigh, N.C, and Consolidated Edison in New York.
BPL also can be used to monitor the health of the power grid. If an outage occurs, the network, which is based on Internet Protocol, can immediately send alerts. Eventually, a utility could even use the network to remotely read meters and switch power on or off.