Duke to open commercial trial with Ambient gear
October 3, 2006
EarthLink to offer internet to 6,000
Duke Energy recently started building the next phase of its master BPL plan -- a commercial trial using Ambient's latest access BPL gear.
The utility for years has been slowly following a plan of phased deployments starting with technology trials that began several years ago.
The latest technology trials at Duke, one of the largest IOUs in the US, included technology from Ambient and Current Technologies.
Previous trials included Mitsubishi -- a relationship that ended recently, reported the Charlotte (NC) Business Journal (http://tinyurl.com/rb4gl).
The Ambient gear was shown on a tour during the UPLC's annual BPL conference in Charlotte two weeks ago.
Duke Energy headquarters are in Charlotte.
The utility sees a bright future for BPL at Duke and throughout the utility industry, Sandra Meyer sees told the audience at the UPLC event.
She's Duke's group vice president of customer service sales and marketing.
The utility believes building, owning and running the network is the best approach, she reported.
Some BPL technology firms may be counting on taking on some of those responsibilities but not Ambient, the technology firm's CEO John Joyce told us Friday.
The Newton, Mass, firm is comfortable with as much or little involvement in each deployment as the utility needs or wants.
Ambient learned from its work with Duke, fine tuned its technology and developed a network management software system that Duke will license.
Duke's decision to go to the commercial phase with Ambient gear is significant -- for Ambient and for the industry, Joyce reported.
One reason Ambient chose to work with Duke in 2005 was that the utility is a seen as a leader in the BPL world, he added.
"Everyone recognizes that.
"They've had a dedicated staff working on BPL, working on business models with BPL, working with the regulators in the various states" where the utility operates and in helping to set the standards, Joyce noted.
Duke is a full member of the UPLC with membership on its board.
It's a member of the HomePlug Powerline Alliance and the UPA and represents the interests of utilities and other BPL users in the IEEE standards efforts (more on that below).
Duke's commitment to BPL has been longstanding and its approach to deploying the technology measured.
Some might call it slow.
Caution is not only typical of the utilities -- an industry that deals with a dangerous product and sometimes costly technology mistakes -- but such diligence at a pioneering firm may be best for the BPL industry.
Ambient gets it.
"We believe that Duke's cautious and rigorous approach to validating our BPL technology prior to this initial deployment further strengthens the credibility of the BPL industry," Joyce told the press last week.
"We've had a number of conversations especially last week down in Charlotte with other utilities that are very much interested in understanding the Duke process," said Joyce.
Duke's progress "puts the whole industry in a different light," he added.
Once the network is built and the homes passed, EarthLink will offer broadband in this deployment, said Joyce.
The household-name ISP is actively looking for such opportunities (BT, 9/19).
Ambient's DS2 edge
We asked Joyce and Ambient's Chief Network Architect Ram Rao about regeneration versus repeating.
We realized the importance of the difference when reporting plans at IBEC and Utility.net (BT, 9/26).
For the sake of clarity -- although we believe these definitions aren't exactly official -- repeating a BPL signal repeats the noise and thus leads to degradation of the content.
Regeneration decodes the signal and recodes it, thus filtering out the noise and creating a signal that can be sent further down the lines.
Repeating is done on the "physical" layer of the network, noted Rao, also called the PHY layer.
But repeating using a higher layer such as layer two -- the data layer or the networking layer means unpacking the data then repacking it and reestablishing a signal, he added.
"That's typically what we do with the DS2-type technology."
But a further distinction exists, said Rao.
Regeneration can be further subdivided into time domain and frequency domain.
Both are available on the DS2 chipset and Rao believes that's not true with HomePlug 1.0 or Turbo chipsets.
Time and frequency domains can be chosen on any DS2 chip and switched remotely.
"The ability to distinguish between time domain and frequency domain is something we've actually been practicing in the field at the Duke installation," noted Joyce.
"It provides a lot of flexibility in the network design and what you are trying to achieve for a cost benefit -- the cost of the equipment versus bandwidth availability," Rao added.
Time domain repeating uses a single chip while frequency domain requires two chips to handle the data, one on the upstream side of the data and the other for the downstream side.
"You can get more bandwidth typically from a frequency domain than a time domain," he added.
Time domain uses all the frequencies at once and thus can only send data one way at a time.
The frequency domain's use of multiple frequencies independently frees up bandwidth but takes more chips, thus takes a larger investment in hardware.
A typical approach is to use a mix -- taking advantage of the savings from time domain repeating in areas where bandwidth is less of an issue, explained Rao.
When lots of new customers sign up on a segment of the network or more bandwidth is needed for whatever reason, switching to frequency modulation may require adding some nodes along the network but will effectively deliver the added bandwidth.
The ability to use both time and frequency offers scalability and flexibility, noted Joyce.
Ambient calls it a "smart build approach."
We reported assertions from another BPL technology firm that the impedance matching on its couplers gives its gear a cleaner signal.
Do Ambient's couplers do that?
All BPL gear has to accomplish impedance matching if it's going to hook to the grid, noted Rao.
It's outside the box
We noticed during the Duke tour that Ambient's node for underground LV lines installs in a separate metal box attached to the outside of the utility's pad-mount transformer box.
We asked the line-workers at the site and they confirmed the external box takes a bit longer to install than BPL gear attached on the inside of the transformer box.
The outside installation is optional, Rao told us last week.
Some prefer the outside installation so a technician that's not necessarily a line-worker can do maintenance on the BPL gear.
The couplers go inside the transformer box, he reminded.
Entire circuits lit
Any utility can fairly easily pass 100 homes with BPL -- but lighting up an entire circuit is a different story, Rao told us Friday.
Ambient's lighting up three, he added.
The zip codes covered in the expanded deployment -- as seen in the FCC-ordered BPL database -- cover much more than 6,000 homes.
That doesn't suggest Duke's future plans but does give a sense of the scale of the expansion (www.ambientcorp.com).
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