By Jo Best, 11 April 2005 17:00
NEWS The EC wants Europe to put more effort into grid. Only it's not grid computing that's catching the Commission's eye - it's the electricity grid.
The European Commission is pushing its 25 member states to look a lot more closely at supplying broadband through the electricity grid and is opening up competition in the broadband-through-power-lines market.
The Union is hoping that market liberalisation will make broadband over the electricity grid more attractive to new companies and encourage existing utility suppliers to use their infrastructure to supply broadband. To that end, the EU is asking member states to remove 'regulatory obstacles' from the market.
The EU is hoping it can use the technology to address the digital divide, with around 200 million power lines running into homes, schools and businesses across the EU.
However, broadband over a power line is still very much a minority phenomenon, with around 80 small-scale trials and rollouts occurring across Europe.
According to analyst house Research and Markets, it won't stay that way for long. The analyst predicts broadband over power lines is now mature enough to threaten the established broadband technologies, with the access services market set to increase with a compound annual growth rate of 86 per cent over the next seven years.
Access services were worth $57.1m in 2004, Research and Markets said.
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1. Allen Pitts
In your recent article on Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) there were many claims made. Such sweeping statements may have a place in the marketing information of the BPL manufacturers, but there is another aspect of BPL that is not mentioned in the press releases of BPL proponents: radio interference. ARRL, the National Association for Amateur Radio here in the US, has participated in testing in a number of the BPL marketing trials and has seen interference to radio reception in almost all of the sites their staff and volunteers have examined. Currently, only those BPL systems that completely avoid the use of spectrum allocated to the Amateur Radio Service appear to have any promise at avoiding most interference that may occur to Amateur Radio. They still can cause interference to other services, such as international shortwave broadcasting. One company, Corridor Systems, uses microwave spectrum for its version of BPL, and this would have the least interference potential that ARRL has seen so far. In many cases, BPL proponents pronounce their marketing trials as being “successful,” but to ARRL’s knowledge, no BPL trial has included a thorough examination of interference issues if deployed on a large scale, so it is premature to pronounce these tests to be a success.
Even past Chairman Powell of the FCC, one of the most vocal proponents of BPL, admitted the seriousness of the interference issues. Simply put, there is no way that radio frequency signals are going to stay contained in a wire designed to carry normal electric power. It will radiate and pollute the radio spectrum. The FCC’s October 2004 Report & Order recognized this danger to communications and totally barred the BPL companies from using frequencies associated with aeronautics and other governmental agencies. Obviously, these concerns about interference and spectrum pollution were not seen as trivial or resolved by the FCC. For the rest of the radio community, there is the FCC promise that if a licensed system experiences harmful interference due to BPL in the area, the BPL provider must either fix it in a timely way or shut their system down.
Your article also did not address the reverse problem of interference to BPL by licensed, legally operating radio systems. Since BPL will be using radio frequencies, it is likely that BPL service will be slowed or even stopped by radio transmissions in the area. Tests have been done by Amateur Radio operators that show that even a few watts of transmitter power nearby can cause some BPL systems to temporarily stop working.
Amateur Radio Operators are not against BPL. In fact, hams have historically been one of the first groups to adopt new technologies and possibilities. What the amateur operators and many other radio user groups are so concerned about is the pollution of wide areas of the radio spectrum by interference from BPL. And, when it comes to radio interference, who would YOU listen to: the FCC and experienced radio operators, or your local electric company?
If you would like more information on this problem in order to present a more balanced picture for future articles about BPL, see the ARRL BPL web page at http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc/. You can also contact me directly using the information in my signature block.
Allen G. Pitts
Media and Public Relations Manager
ARRL
(860) 594-0328
apitts@arrl.org