FCC Statistics Suggest Minuscule Market Share for BPL:
from
The ARRL Letter, Vol 25, No 15
on
April 13, 2006
Website:
http://www.arrl.org/
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FCC Statistics Suggest Minuscule Market Share for BPL:
The latest FCC
statistics on the status of high-speed Internet services indicate a
minuscule market share for broadband over power line (BPL). The FCC Wireline
Competition Bureau report, "High-Speed Services for Internet Access: Status
as of June 30, 2005," puts at 4872 the number of business and residential
"Power Line and Other" connections that deliver at speeds greater than 200
kbps in at least one direction. The total number of high-speed lines for all
technologies is 42,866,469--the vast majority DSL, cable and traditional
wireline connections. This puts the share for "Power Line and Other" at a
bit more than 0.01 percent of the total. The number of residential BPL
"advanced services" lines--greater than 200 kbps in both directions--is 3916
out of 34,259,411, the FCC report indicates. Although some data have been
withheld as proprietary, the FCC report indicates there are 18 "Power Line
and Other" high-speed providers nationwide. Facilities-based broadband
providers must report the number of high-speed connections in service to the
FCC twice a year.
Source:
The ARRL Letter
Vol. 25, No. 15
April 14, 2006
This article has expired. No more comments may be added.
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FCC Statistics Suggest Minuscule Market Share for
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by KX8N on April 13, 2006
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I've said it since the introduction of BPL - it's death blow is going to be market share. Broadband is SO easy to get. You can get DSL, Cable, Wi-Fi, and even satellite. There's no NEED for another broadband source, unless they're going to sell it at a reasonable price, say $15 per month. You're not going to see that kind of price coming from a "new" technology.
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RE: FCC Statistics Suggest Minuscule Market Share
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by W9WHE-II on April 14, 2006
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We better hope this is true, because ONLY economics can kill BPL. arrl sure can't!
W9WHE
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RE: FCC Statistics Suggest Minuscule Market Share
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by K4RAF on April 14, 2006
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"Broadband is SO easy to get."
Tell that to the 85% of my county (of 25,000) who can't get it. No DSL or cable. Verizon sucks!
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RE: FCC Statistics Suggest Minuscule Market Share
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by W1RFI on April 15, 2006
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The same factors that make it not economical for DSL or cable to provide broadband to your area apply in spaded to BPL, CJ. So that will not be your panacea. Yes, the power lines are there, but in most areas, cable wiring is already in place and in virtually all areas, telephone wiring is in place. It is just not economical for the cable or phone companies to buy the additional equipment needed to send a broadband signal down the existing wires and to do the other things needed to make it work.
After deploying BPL past several thousand homes in Allentown, PA, PPL announced that its 1.2 million customer base was not large enough to make BPL work economically. (I will never understand that position, but that's what they said.)
BPL needs to install a repeater on the line every 500 to 2000 feet. That doesn't sound very economical. They need a coupler to get from the MV lines (or other backbone) to the 240-volt wiring at every transformer that would have a BPL coupler. In some cases, each customer has to use a proprietary modem.
With DS2-based BPL, each installation needs to be carefully planned, deciding how to use different spectrum on each adjacent leg of the system. This is far from plug and play.
Several studies have been done that show that the latency issues of having to go through more than three or four repeaters means that the system will not be capable of blazing speed in any case over long runs. BPL is NOT good to run down miles of line. To make it work, they run a real backbone to a neighborhood and literally use BPL for the last mile ... or last 500 feet. They also have to clean up all of the stronger power-line noises that they have not been able to find in response to Amateur complaints.
I would not count on BPL coming to your rural county, CJ. Perhaps a smart wireless entrepreneur could provide wireless broadband to the area.
Ed, W1RFI
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FCC Statistics Suggest Minuscule Market Share for
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by K2JVI on April 15, 2006
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Ed-you are right on the mark!.
As someone who works in IT(and because of this I'm supposed to be madly in favor of BPL) I part company with many of my fellow IT people on BPL because of the inherent flaws with the system. Having repeaters every 500-1000 feet is expensive in terms of money and network performance. The report from the FCC echoes what I've been saying for the last 18 months,technology and the marketplace will ultimately outmode BPL and it appears that trend is off to a good start. For the amount of money and effort to make MV BPL work,even remotely well, a better investement would be a fiber optic backbone which can provide tremendous bandwidth for many years and run rings(no pun intended) around BPL.
I've said this many times,it seems an ignorance of basic RF knowledge among many in IT/Computer Science that make BPL seem attractive.
Ed-keep up the good work. I know other disciplines may smear us hams from time to time, but the "real world" hands on RF knowledge among us is hard to beat.
73's..
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RE: FCC Statistics Suggest Minuscule Market Share
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by K4RAF on April 18, 2006
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"I would not count on BPL coming to your rural county, CJ."
Never did. My elec coop went wireless & was featured on CNBC. It has since been sold to a bunch of slackers who dropped from 88 customers at handover, to 8 customers 6 months later.
"Perhaps a smart wireless entrepreneur could provide wireless broadband to the area."
DONE !
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RE: FCC Statistics Suggest Minuscule Market Share
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by W1RFI on April 21, 2006
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All IMHO:
In the long run, the only technology that will keep up with our ever-increasing demand for speed is, IMHO, fiber to the premises (FTTP). Inside the fiber, the speed is virtually unlimited. The limitation at this point is in the technology that gets signals into and out of the fiber. As our computers evolve, that technology will evolve along with it. At some point in the future, I would predict that data rates measured in Mb/s will be seen to be as impractical as a 56 kb/s modem appears today. There are many folks getting by with dialup for a number of reasons, but that is getting to be harder and harder with time.
Fiber to the curb will also hold great promise, in combination with other broadband techniques. I could envision FTTC architectures that delivered the final leg by wireless, with 802.11b on the low end, faster 802.X as a middle tier, and faster wireless or lightwave as the premiere tier. In other cases, it may be most practical to deliver the final leg by 240-volt wiring BPL, especially to larger apartment buildings where the larger volume of customers could justify the additional cost of BPL.
Even BPL has promise, if changes to the architecture of the wiring could be made. A university in PA outlined that the Shannon limit of BPL could be 1 Gb/s over relatively short distances, if the lines were properly conditioned and noise sources on the line were eliminated. (I translated this to mean that if power lines were different than power lines are, they could be made to work well for BPL, but that's one man's interpretation). But more practically, if MV distribution lines were also made to be good RF transmissions lines (ie, coaxial, with good shielding) and in-premise wiring were better balanced for RF, most of the interference concerns for BPL would be moot.
I will add that the number of BPL lines in the US as of mid year last year was 4,800. That is about 0.011% of the total. Cable or DSL each added more lines every day than exist for BPL. And the number is apt to be even smaller today. Since the mid 2005 reporting period, PPL abandoned a medium-size commercial deployment in Allentown and IDACORP shut down any interest it had in BPL. Although new BPL trials have cropped up, others have gone down.
In the long run, BPL may have some use for utility applications. That seems to be the general interest of utilities at this point. TXU and CenterPoint (CnP) in Texas have both announced major plans to deploy large BPL installations primarily to use for utility applications, although leasing lines to BPL enterpreneurs will be too appealing to resist.
TXU has chosen to with Current Technologies -- a BPL technology that does not use the ham bands. Based on experience in Cincinatti, I don't expect major interference problems. CnP is going with Corinex, a DS2 generation 2 company. They are an unknown, and other DS2 G2 installations HAVE had EMI problems. However, ARRL is working with DS2 and properly used, it is possible that the G2 product could work better than has been seen to date. The League also has dialogue with Corinex, although at this point, we are talking about talking. I have an excellent relationship with the CnP engineer working on the project and he is committed to not having the system cause harmful interfence to Amateur Radio.
With utility apps, that could be possible, ensuring that the system doesn't exceed the emissions limits and using sufficient guard bands to reduce the emissions in the guard bands. That slows the system down a bit, but there would still be plenty of bandwidth available to run the utility applications.
Ed Hare, W1RFI
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RE: FCC Statistics Suggest Minuscule Market Share
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by K4RAF on April 21, 2006
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"In the long run, the only technology that will keep up with our ever-increasing demand for speed is, IMHO, fiber to the premises (FTTP). Inside the fiber, the speed is virtually unlimited."
Granted but if you look at the more successful broadband countries, geography is a small fraction of what it is here in the US. How hard is it to cover Sweden or Korea? That is less than the total area of Texas. Alot of glass in the dirt is still needed here to ever cover a majority of the US.
"The limitation at this point is in the technology that gets signals into and out of the fiber."
If the FTTP model is not married with some percentage of wireless technology, you are dependent on fixed line logistics.
"As our computers evolve, that technology will evolve along with it."
Indeed correct. However, as our computers evolve, they are becoming more portable, much smaller & more powerful. The FTTP pipedream must address mobility issues before it becomes a ubiquitous delivery platform. I agree it is promising but I also do not see the major telcos pushing glass underground unless someone else is paying for the shovel time.
While we are on the whole subject, I'd like to share this as further background toward the convergence of wireless & broadband availability. Bear with me as it does have ham radio implications that caught my attention & apply toward what I said above about "mobility" & fiber:
"A growing group of technologists are working to build "home-made" open source cell phones, following in the footsteps of the popular FireFox Web browser.
"Five years ago, you wouldn’t have been able to build a cell phone", says Surj Patel, a telecommunications engineer. "You could have bought bits and pieces, but you would have needed a million-dollar lab to put everything together."
However, as chip functionality improves and costs fall, simple homemade cell phones are on the verge of becoming a reality. Many techies intend to use the phones to program in custom capabilities, such as RFID readers, or GPS capabilities.
A key initiative is to replace proprietary operating systems used on most phones with open source code, such as Linux. Most cell phone manufacturers keep software a closely guarded secret and have expensive licensing fees and royalties. A free, or low-cost, operating system would benefit phone manufacturers, since expensive license fees from operating systems would no longer be required.The dawn of open source mobile phones could ignite a contagion of application development for developing countries, where cell phones are the most promising computing platform."
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RE: FCC Statistics Suggest Minuscule Market Share
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by K4RAF on April 21, 2006
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I really wish you could edit post on eHam after posting !!
An added point is that while we are in the US, the implications of broadband in the developing world demands wireless mobilty. There is no FTTP in Mozambique & there likely will never be. Yet they could & have implemented simple wireless solutions in such underdeveloped countries without much infrastructure requirements. Then consider if you would utilize the open source handset for such things as VoIP & education applications.
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