Nation's First Major Broadband Over Powerline Deployment Shuts Down

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks)
Date: April 13, 2010 7:18:04 PM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Nation's First Major Broadband Over Powerline Deployment Shuts Down

Nation's First Major Broadband Over Powerline Deployment Shuts Down
from the next-time-listen-to-the-engineers dept
By Karl Bode April 13, 2010
<http://techdirt.com/articles/20100409/0826178949.shtml>

We've talked for many years about how broadband over powerline (BPL) technology has failed to live up to what little 
potential it possessed as a viable major third broadband pipe. Pretty much since the technology's inception, the FCC 
praised BPL as the "great broadband hope," going out of its way to ignore the technology's rather nasty potential to 
interfere with local emergency and ham radio signals. Engineers repeatedly criticized the unshielded delivery system as 
impractical, but the FCC (and pretty much everybody else) repeatedly ignored them.

To help gloss over FCC broadband policy failures that fortified monopoly or duopoly markets, the FCC told anyone who 
would listen that BPL was the magic elixir that would save us all from the lack of competition in the broadband sector. 
Think tanks with ties to BPL hardware vendors issued study after study informing everyone that this would be the year 
that BPL finally took off. The technology press by and large believed it, flooding the wires with a long line of 
stories about BPL's immense, untapped potential. The problem was that in addition to the technologynot really working, 
many utilities simply didn't want to get into the broadband business, and speeds delivered via BPL were quickly 
overshadowed by wireless and faster cable technologies like DOCSIS 3.0.
Manassas, Virginia has long been the poster child for BPL's supposed successes, and was the first real non-trial 
deployment of the technology in the United States. The city's network, built by a company named COMTek, offered city 
residents speeds slower than 1 Mbps for $24.95 a month. By 2008, COMTek was starting to realize their fortunes would 
never be made in residential broadband using an inherently flawed technology, so they sold the network to the city -- 
and it has been sucking Manassas dry ever since. After pouring $1.6 million into the network and losing about $166,000 
a year -- the city this week finally voted to shut the network down. All 520 residents have been told to find a new 
ISP, and the remnants of the city's "great broadband hope" are being sold off for scrap.

COMTek, who often took an adversarial approach to dealing with local ham radio interference complaints, is now focusing 
on selling intelligent power network monitoring systems to utilities. Former FCC boss Michael Powell has since moved on 
to a lucrative career working for broadband carrier funded think tanks, where he's still busily hallucinating about 
competition in the broadband sector. As for the residents of Manassas, if it's any comfort, most of them have the cozy 
local duopoly of Verizon and Comcast to fall back on.

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