It could be a great leap forward for a technology that the market had seemingly left behind.
IBM has agreed to partner with a small communications firm to invest in sending broadband internet access signals over ordinary power lines, especially in rural areas of the country and possibly in some big city neighborhoods, as well.
IBM and a company called International Broadband Electric Communications Inc. will try to make the idea work in communities that don’t have other broadband options and at the same time seek to rejuvenate an idea that has failed to find a stable niche in the past.
Their strategy is to sign up electric cooperatives that provide power to sparsely populated areas across the eastern United States. Rather than compete with large, entrenched cable or DSL providers, IBEC is looking for customers that have been largely left out of the shift to high-speed Internet.
Ray Blair, IBM”™s director of advanced networking, said that technology upgrades and the basics of simple topography bode well for the new initiative. Â
“The technology for this when it first came out did not work very well,” said Blair about initial efforts to send broadband Internet service over power lines, which he refers to as BPL. As recently as three years ago, he said, the speed of data was 15 megabits per second. Now that data transfer speed has been upped to 200 mps.
The technology also physically shrank, with the control box that used to be the size of a small refrigerator now reduced “to the size of a couple of cigar boxes,” Blair said.
Additionally, a technology called “notching” allows for remote changes in the frequencies that are being accessed, so that the interference problems that once led to complaints from amateur radio operators and even emergency service personnel can be avoided by switching frequencies.       Â
In the past, the problems were such that the BPL technology has never caught on. Federal Communications Commission statistics for 2006, the most recent year available, showed that fewer than 5,000 customers in the U.S. had broadband access through power lines. And Blair said that it will remain a niche market in some ways, with rural communities being the main customers for the technology.
“It depends on where you are going and what you need to do,” said Blair. “I”™m not saying BPL is the answer for everyone, it isn”™t. But for a rural environment where there is no infrastructure, and lot of obstruction, it is probably the only way you can deliver broadband to a home and a farm.”
He said satellite Internet service is problematic because while down link is rapid the uplink is slow. And he said that while wireless is a valid option in populated areas, in areas without towers or in mountainous terrain, the cost of installing infrastructure is prohibitive unless there is a population base to make the investment worthwhile. And since wireless infrastructure requires line of sight linkages, hills or mountains interfere with the link, requiring additional towers to relay data. Â
In theory, the BPL idea is simple. The technology involves sending data on the same wires that provide electricity. Every half a mile or so, a device clamped to the line perpetuates the signal. Inside homes, customers plug a modem into any wall outlet and log on.
IBM has signed a $9.6 million deal with IBEC to provide and install the equipment. IBEC CEO Scott Lee said putting the network in place should take about two years and cost as much as $70 million.
The company will have access to 340,000 homes in Alabama, Indiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin, about 86 percent of which have no cable or DSL access, Lee said. Capturing a large segment of that market would be a huge step for IBEC, which currently provides only about 1,400 customers with broadband, most of them starting in the past year and half.
The basic service will start at $29.95 per month, with more expensive plans offering higher speeds.
And Blair adds that there is a potential for other markets that are not remotely located in rural areas, but are in fact right in the middle of the so-called digital divide. He said IBM has a pilot project with the New York City Housing Authority to use broadband capability to operate security cameras and intercoms within buildings owned by the authority. Many of these buildings are brick and concrete and the walls contain asbestos, so that operations drilling holes in walls to upgrade wires can be costly and to some extent, toxic. Thus, it is cheaper easier and safer to use the existing electric wires for some safety operations and the network could go beyond surveillance and security intercoms into providing access to the internet.
For new construction, Blair said, fiber optics would be his preferred wiring plan to ensure the building had broadband access to the Internet. But in older brick and concrete structures, even wireless can have trouble sending signals very far and thus, he said, it may be most cost effective to use BPL to bridge the digital divide even in some city centers. He said the company is exploring the idea.
