POWERLINE PROMISES BROKEN ON BROADBAND

In February 2005, the New Millennium Research Council, a Washington think tank, convened a national press conference to present a white paper asking the question, “Is 2005 the year of BPL?” The paper was unclear about what it might mean to be “the year” of broadband-over-powerline, though it did say, “Many technology experts point to 2005 as a time when BPL can achieve strong growth, demonstrate success in existing deployments and expand into many parts of the country.”

At the time, the council said there were 20 active BPL trials in the U.S.

Joe Fergus, CEO of ComTek, which was deploying the country's first citywide BPL network in Manassas, Va., said in that press conference, “[BPL] is going to become a much bigger factor across the U.S. during 2005.”

As it turned out, BPL didn't become a big factor even across Manassas. Fergus had hoped to reach 20% to 30% penetration of the local market when the network was scheduled for completion in April 2005. But today, the project still has less than 10% penetration.

If 2005 didn't quite fulfill the expectations of the BPL sector's participants, it's probably because the chipsets the industry was expecting to hit the market last year — delivering speeds between 80 Mb/s and 200 Mb/s — were unexpectedly delayed, said Walt Adams, ComTek's vice president overseeing BPL.

Now that those chips are hitting the market, he said, “2006 is certainly going to see a lot more success.”

Perhaps more so than most technologies, BPL runs the risk of conjuring what was once said mockingly of Brazil: It's the country of the future. Always has been, always will be.

“[BPL] is one of the only technologies that's been the same for the last four, five, six years,” said Nicole Klein, an analyst at Yankee Group. Even the introduction of new, speedier chipsets seems “kind of like a shoulder shrug,” she said.

Earlier this year, Current Communications made waves in the BPL world by adding voice-over-IP (VoIP) service to the BPL network it built with Cinergy, a utility in Cincinnati. But the company won't reveal many details about its progress there and hasn't disclosed how many customers it serves in Cincinnati.

“We haven't felt the need to,” said Jim Mollenkopf, Current's vice president of architecture and products. “But we've got many, many customers there.”

Current Technologies (Current Communications' equipment vendor counterpart) claims its BPL gear is currently under trial by utility companies in Hawaii and California, whose public utilities commission in April approved a set of rules allowing testing of BPL technology.

ComTek is already planning an upgrade in June of the Manassas network it began deploying in late 2003 and completed last year. Today, most of the project's roughly 1000 subscribers are getting 500 kb/s to 800 kb/s Internet service, but ComTek wants to turn that up a notch. The new network offers speeds between 1 Mb/s and 4 Mb/s. Adams expects to have 20% of the network upgraded by November.

Just by staying alive, ComTek's and Current's deployments stand out as sterling successes in a sector littered with abandoned BPL trials, Klein said. Plenty of BPL projects have turned out like the one begun in Penn Yan, N.Y., in 2003, which was rejected in 2004 because of security and interference concerns and replaced with a trial of wireless mesh technology.

Graded on a curve, Current gets high marks for not only keeping its Cincinnati BPL services afloat, but for rolling out VoIP there in addition to high-speed Internet, Yankee's Klein said. However, viewed in the context of the larger telecom industry, its achievements are perhaps not as impressive.

“I don't see [Current] competing with triple-play services,” Klein said. “They're not offering IPTV. They probably will never be able to.”

BPL might be best applied where alternative forms of broadband aren't available. For example, West Virginia's Radford University is testing BPL as a means to reach students who live off-campus, beyond the reach of its own network.

ComTek's Fergus has said that the sweet spot for BPL providers lies in towns dense enough and populous enough to yield attractive economics of scale, but not so populous as to attract more than one or two broadband providers. Populations between 25,000 and 100,000 are ideal, he said.

“Anywhere there are DSL or cable [broadband] options, [BPL providers] are going to run into some barriers,” Klein said.

Another place BPL is likely to find a niche is inside homes themselves. In fact, for in-home BPL, 2005 actually was a notable year. The HomePlug Powerline Alliance ratified its “AV” standard for in-home BPL, replacing a 14 Mb/s standard with one supporting 200 Mb/s, posing the intriguing possibility of using power lines to carry multiple high-definition television signals from one room to the next. The standard's potential snowballed as Intel put its weight behind the technology, joined the HPPA, took over its presidency and invested in BPL chipmaker Intellon.

Consumers, so far, are demanding predominantly wireless in-home networks for their data services, using BPL only when wireless won't work — and even then getting BPL from retail outlets rather than from service providers. But triple-play applications might open doors for big-bandwidth technologies like BPL AV.

However, HPPA will be challenged to win BPL converts among telco triple-play providers. The same month Intel joined the HPPA, Verizon joined the Multimedia Coax Alliance (MOCA) and voiced its preference for coaxial cable as in-home wiring. In so doing, Verizon may blaze a clear path for smaller independent telcos rolling out triple-play services. But telcos might also opt more often for coax simply based on the merits of the medium itself.

“MOCA is a much cleaner spectrum,” Klein said. “With BPL, IPTV signals are competing with everything else that's on that network. It's a very busy network. All your appliances are on that network. Everything plugged into the wall is on that network. The standard is created so that signals can blast through that noisy environment. But with coax, you don't have to deal with any of those issues.”

That's why Klein and many others in the BPL sector expect to see hybrid in-home networks, perhaps using BPL for data and voice and coax for video.

“BPL is just a golf club in the bag, just like fiber and copper,” Adams said. “You use the clubs that will best help you in each situation. There's no one magic technology, no one club that you'd play throughout the game.”

Besides HPPA, multiple standards groups are in various stages of creating their own BPL standards, including the Universal Powerline Alliance, the Consumer Electronics Powerline Communications Alliance and the Open PLC European Research Alliance (which announced a complete standard in February).

These various standards aren't necessarily compatible with one another, leading to concerns in the industry regarding equipment interoperability. Some hope the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, as a pre-eminent standards body, can remedy some of these concerns by bringing these groups together under its big tent.

Since the middle of last year, the IEEE has been crafting its own specification for both in-home and access BPL networks, with help from many of the other standards groups. Called P1901, the key IEEE BPL standard probably won't be finished until next year.

There's also concern about the timing of the standards. As with any nascent technology, if standards come too soon, they could stifle innovation. If they come too late, they might pose compatibility problems for installed bases of pre-standard technology. But there's also hope that sturdier standards will stimulate BPL deployment.

“Electric utilities love certainty,” Mollenkopf said. “A more unified [BPL] specification could be a positive thing for market growth.”

As the higher-speed chipsets roll out in volume, Adams said, “We think this year is going to be an important year from the vendors' standpoint.”

But BPL proponents seemed to have learned their lesson. No matter how optimistic they might be, no one is willing to call 2006 “the year of BPL.”