Gloating, like tapdancing on an enemy's face, is 'not a good look' but I confess to a moment of satisfaction on hearing that the Manassas (Virginia) broadband over powerline [aka BPL] project has been abandoned.
BPL has been recurrently touted as a low cost mechanism for delivering broadband connectivity to households via standard urban and rural power networks, ie the wires that provide the juice for your domestic, industrial or office lights, printers, dishwashers, televisions, hotwater systems, airconditioners and other devices. the expectation has been that rather than digging up roads to lay fibre optic cable or festooning trees and powerpoles with more copper wire, ading a few tweaks to the existing power reticulation system would give everyone cheap reliable connectivity.
Some of the promoters of that vision were simply naive. Others, more sadly, were unscrupulous, with disingenuous media releases for example appearing when it was time to boost an ailing share price, to give a bit of sizzle to a tired corporate image or buff the authority of a telco regulator. The breathlessness of coverage by some online/offline publications reflected badly on their credibility, as did dismissal by enthusiasts of people who questioned aspects of BPL deployment or noted lacunae in corporate media releases. BPL for many people was a matter of true believers (undeterred by mundane realities of commercial viability) and of projects that were announced with a bang but abandoned in the dead of nighte.
In a past life I was one of the skeptics, noting that although BPL was technically feasible it was not commercially competitive, that it appeared unlikely to become competitive and that there were questions about how the technology was being promoted.
In essence, it is indeed possible to use a standard power grid to deliver connectivity to/from homes. It is necessary to modify the grid to 'inject' the signal and - as importantly - to reduce radiofrequency interference. That modification, and its ongoing maintenance (some equipment does not appear to have been particularly robust and for example has been recurrently fritzed by lightning strikes), was expensive. Those installation and maintenance costs meant that BPL did not stack up well against traditional cable, wireless, satellite, fibre or other connectivity. (In one of my more waspish moments I noted that it is possible to use bongo drums or pigeons as mechanisms for internet connectivity but that those mechanisms are not commercially competitive ... and not just because hawks acquire a taste for pigeon on the fly!)
In the US the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the national equivalent of Australia's ACMA, gained attention for promoting BPL as the "great broadband hope", ignoring cogent criticisms from some economists, engineers and a range of users of radio spectrum (including defence agencies and police and fire services). BPL, it was claimed, would solve the lack of competition in the broadband sector, a vision reflected in puffery by some utility executives and publicists who painted rosy pictures of benevolent power companies endearing themselves to rural/urban customers by supplying phone, power and internet services without having to raise power charges. What's not to love?
It was thus unsurprising to see a succession of announcements that 'this year' was at last going to be 'the year' that BPL would take over and that the skeptics would be definitively proved wrong. In reality no-one was able to get the figures to work out the right way, ongoing vendor support was uncertain, investors weren't fully persuaded to drink the BPL koolade, trials (some Australian exercises are noted here) produced disappointing results and alternative delivery mechanisms gained market share.
In 2008 network operator/technology vendor COMTek exited from the model urban BPL network in Manassa, selling the facility to the city and thereafter concentrating on 'smart monitoring' systems. Manassas, after experiencing losses of around US$166,000 per year, has now pulled the plug. The network encompassed around 520 subscribers, hardly a major number. Its demise follows the abandonment of smaller trials in other parts of the US. BPL to the household remains a curiosity and an example of why we should be sceptical about some of the more upbeat predictions of a glorious low cost broadband future.
