Texas: Austin to test broadband over power lines

City wants to find out whether electrical grid can carry information.

By Robert Elder
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, July 28, 2006

The Austin City Council on Thursday approved spending up to $317,500 to test an emerging technology that delivers broadband Internet service over conventional power lines.

The technology, however, won't reach area homes anytime soon, if ever.

Peter Collins, the city's chief information officer, said the project will test how well Austin Energy's power lines, transformers and other infrastructure are able to deliver broadband.

"Everyone is saying how great this is," Collins said of broadband over power lines, which for years has been touted as a third high-speed Internet pipe into homes and businesses, competing with cable and the digital subscriber line service offered by phone companies. "All we want to know is, what does this really do?

"I don't like to jump on a new technology just because everyone else is jumping on it," he said. "This is an education pilot program for us."

Collins said the city is highly unlikely to compete with cable and DSL service.

Instead, he said, city departments will be the first users of the system for functions such as remote metering of water and electricity use and to detect problems on power lines and other equipment.

The council hired GTSI Corp. to oversee the design and construction of the network. GTSI, based in Chantilly, Va., will use Boise, Idaho-based PowerGrid Communications to build the network.

Broadband over power lines, known as BPL, hasn't taken hold in the consumer or commercial markets as a viable competitor to cable and DSL.

Users connect to BPL through a modem plugged into an electrical outlet.

Getting data to that point, however, requires what the industry calls a smart grid. High-voltage lines carry too much power to allow data to move reliably on the line, so BPL uses low-voltage lines.

The signal must be boosted along the line by devices called repeaters, which amplify the data and pass it along to the next repeater. The data also must be routed around bypass transformers, which reduce standard voltage enough for household use.

Major utilities are keen on the technology.

A unit of Dallas-based TXU Corp. paid $150 million for part ownership in Current Communications Group LLC, which is developing a BPL network on TXU's transmission system that could potentially serve 2 million customers.

But TXU, like most utilities installing or testing BPL, is also looking at ways to install sophisticated monitoring devices to detect equipment problems in their early stages and cut repair costs.

Collins said a hybrid form of BPL could be used by the city for remote reading of meters, for instance. Austin Energy would be able to read a meter from a close-by wireless connection.

Some opposition to BPL has come from ham radio operators, who say the technology interferes with ham and short-wave radio transmissions.

Collins said that he is working with local ham radio groups to monitor interference problems and that once the network is built, the city will test systemwide for such problems.