By David Gewirtz
Ever since the establishment of the Rural Electrification Administration by Franklin Roosevelt back in May of 1935, America has been served by a nearly universal electrical grid. A new technology, broadband over powerline (BPL), intends to provide high-speed Internet service over that grid, so that everywhere there's power, there's also the possibility of high-speed Internet.
But what if, at the flick of a switch, radios stopped working? What if police radios, emergency response radios, fire radios, aircraft communications radios, radios used in commercial communications, and even ham radios just stopped working?
This is exactly what opponents of broadband over powerline claim could happen if BPL were allowed to be implemented on a wide-spread basis.
Is it true? Is BPL the helpful key to nearly universal high-speed Internet access or a technology that could cripple our critical radio frequency infrastructure? This is the question that Computing Unplugged Magazine set out to answer. This article contains the result of our in-depth multi-issue analysis.
Benefits of BPL
The most obvious benefit of BPL is broadband Internet service, delivered into homes without additional wires and infrastructure. While many of us now have access to broadband via cable modem or DSL service, those services are not universally available and often require special wiring in the home.
BPL aims to provide a similar broadband service, deliverable out of any standard electrical socket. For most Americans, this means an alternative to cable and DSL, but for some, it means access to broadband in areas where cable and DSL service are not provided. For those in emerging nations, it means access to broadband service where there is no other communications infrastructure.
For the electric utility companies, providing this broadband service provides an incremental revenue source. There is, however, another benefit to the electric utility companies that could dwarf the potential incremental revenue derived from providing ISP services.
Today, most domestic power meters must be read manually. This involves sending representatives of the utility company out to the meter, paying salaries, managing fleets of vehicles, and absorbing rising gasoline costs to get the meter readers to the meter, plus the additional costs for data entry into the utility's tracking databases. This process is enormously expensive to the electrical utilities and often fraught with inaccuracy and sometimes with fraud.
