Nation's First Major Broadband Over Powerline Deployment Shuts Down

from the next-time-listen-to-the-engineers dept

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 technology not 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.

There are still a few scattered deployments of BPL left in the country, but they serve only a few thousand people and will likely be supplanted in time by faster next-generation wireless. There's absolutely no doubt Manassas leaders should have done their homework before buying the network, though the FCC's whitewashing of the technology's problems didn't exactly help. Maybe next time the FCC should listen to actual engineers instead of salesmen for companies trying to sell the public a broken product.

Filed Under: bpl, broadband, fcc

BPL Lives On, Again

from the 9-lives dept

Broadband over powerline has gotten lots and lots of attention and investment over the past decade or so, but remains little more than a black hole of hype. Every once in a while, a story comes along to remind us that despite its near-total lack of traction, BPL abides. Now it could apparently be in line to get some money from the economic stimulus bill. We've been skeptical of any broadband stimulus, in large part because it looked more like handouts to incumbents than anything meaningful. But putting more money towards BPL, given its market failure and lack of progress, would be shambolic.

Filed Under: bpl, broadband, broadband over powerlines, stimulus

Apparently BPL Isn't Quite Dead Yet

from the it-just-flinched! dept

For well over a decade, we've seen nothing useful come out of investments in broadband over powerlines. It's been a money-sucking pit that has rarely worked particularly well, and never found many customers. The biggest and most hyped-up experiments failed pretty miserably, and just last month it seemed like we could officially declare BPL dead. Apparently, IBM did not get that memo, as it just invested nearly $10 million in a BPL offering for rural customers. We give them props for their optimism in a technology that has been nothing but trouble for years, but unless they've come up with something radically different than all those failed projects, we expect to be reading a story in another year or two about this project shutting down as well.

Filed Under: bpl, broadband over powerlines
Companies: ibm

Can We Declare Broadband Over Powerlines Officially Dead?

from the bpl-was-doa dept

We've been hearing about broadband over powerlines (BPL) for over a decade, supposedly as the savior of broadband competition. There was just one problem: the technology never worked well enough to scale in any reasonable means. In the mid-90s, we had heard a prediction that BPL could only work in very small communities, and only at a limited range and speed. Yet, over the years, there were so many stories about BPL actually making headway in the market, we began to wonder if maybe (just maybe) someone had figured out how to make it scale. It turns out the answer is no. Despite being labeled the "great broadband hope" by former FCC boss Michael Powell, BPL has been nothing but a great broadband joke from the beginning, never getting more than 5,000 subscribers. Now, Broadband Reports that one of the highest profile BPL rollouts is soon to be shut down. The company that built the network and hyped it for years tried to sell it off, and having failed to find any actual buyers, had the city take it over. The city considered just shutting it down immediately, but has agreed to keep it going for a year or so, when it will likely be turned off for good.

Filed Under: bpl, broadband, broadband over powerlines

Fewer Than 5,000 Broadband Over Powerlines Subscribers

from the again:-it's-dead,-jim dept

Following the story earlier in the week about the death of broadband over powerlines, Broadband Reports points out that even by the FCC's "stunningly meaningless" broadband stats (that tend to inflate access claims), BPL only has 4,776 subscribers. This for the technology that it declared as "the great broadband hope" five years ago. So, once more, with feeling: broadband over powerlines is dead. It's not a serious option.

Filed Under: bpl, broadband over powerlines

Broadband Over Powerlines Is Dead, Dead, Dead

from the say-goodbye dept

For many, many years we've pointed out the reasons why broadband over powerlines was unlikely to succeed. Despite the FCC calling it the "the great broadband hope," many people referred to it as "the great broadband joke." The technology just wasn't able to deliver what was promised and certainly couldn't scale effectively. Now, as Broadband Reports points out, one of the big "flagship" deployments of BPL, in Dallas, has been sold and is going to shut down internet access. Instead, the buyer is just going to use it for monitoring the electrical grid. Given that this is just the latest in a long line of failures -- and that the technology has never worked up to the level promised, can we finally put to rest the idea that BPL is a legitimate "third pipe" for broadband?

Filed Under: bpl, broadband over powerlines, dallas

Still Waiting On Broadband Over Powerlines

from the fat-pipe-dreams dept

For quite some time -- nearly ten years -- we've been hearing about the supposed benefits of broadband over powerlines (BPL) and how it would deliver a new competitor into the broadband market. The only problem is that it's never gone anywhere, despite the neverending hype. So here we are, in 2007... and BPL is still going nowhere. One BPL company is now trying a bit of a different tack (perhaps since BPL as a broadband technology doesn't seem to work too well) by pitching its systems as eco-friendly tools that let people remotely control their appliances. The NY Post almost gets distracted enough by that claim to almost miss the fact that yet another power company has tried BPL, but doesn't plan to expand its use of the technology. So, in case you were wondering, yes, BPL's still out there, and still treading water.

Filed Under: bpl, broadband, powerlines