[1st-mile-nm] BPL challenges

[Andrew Cohill]

I spoke to a rural electric coop recently that has been experimenting  
with BPL from several vendors for three years, and is still not able  
to get more than a couple hundred kilobits of bandwidth when the  
distances are more than a mile or two from the transformer.  Bandwidth  
issues aside, a weakness of BPL appears to be that a wide area  
deployment can cost a significant fraction of what you would spend for  
fiber or a hybrid fiber/wireless deployment.

We're working on a project right now with a public electric utility  
that has decided to run fiber to substations in its rural areas and  
then deply WiMax both for broadband but also for electric power  
management and meter reading, using low power wireless close to the  
home for the meter reading stuff.

In an open services network, the electric utility can become an anchor  
tenant for AMI/AMR services.

Andrew

On Apr 7, 2008, at 11:56 PM, Dale Carstensen wrote:

>
> The xcel energy and current group BPL (Broadband over Power
> Lines) stuff seems to me to be not BPL, but rather NPL (Narrowband
> over Power Lines) for such purposes as remote meter reading,
> distribution control (hmm, probably security problems here,
> come to think of it, maybe financial chicanery could happen
> with the meter reading, too) and management of non-utility
> power generation (customers of power utilities selling
> photovoltaic or wind or biomass electrical generation back
> to the grid).

-------------------------------------------------
Andrew Michael Cohill, Ph.D.
President
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