FCC Tech Official Says Agency’s in Good Company Pushing BPL

Manassas, Va., shows BPL’s potential, Franca said: With the technology’s introduction, cable modem rates dropped 30%. BPL isn’t taking broadband to homes in the town; linked to Wi-Fi downtown and at the train station, it’s building traffic and commerce, and it’s providing high-speed access in municipal offices, he said. Connected cameras provide security at the transformer site, and the city is experimenting with webcams for traffic control and looking at other public safety uses, Franca said.

The only outstanding interference complaint to the FCC, in Cottonwood, Ariz., is expected to be resolved, Franca said, without elaborating. The number of complaints has been “not bad,” he said, considering how sour relations with ham operators had turned after “starting out on a fairly good basis.” Complaints in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., and near Raleigh, N.C., against BPL systems that had been tweaked beforehand didn’t turn up the feared interference, Franca said. And he “got to spend a week in… tobacco fields, swatting flies and mosquitos” in N.C.

The FCC was careful to act on interference concerns in the “fairly contentious rulemaking” with thousands of comments, Franca said. It set rules seeking to minimize: (1) Risks from both the frequency levels and radiation from outside power lines, which set the proceeding apart from the typical Part 15 inquiry. (2) The chances of shutdowns of the service by virtue of its subordination to priority licensed uses. he said.

“We had the good fortune to have incompetent opposition” to the FCC rules, said lawyer Mitchell Lazarus, who represented BPL company Current Communications in the proceeding. All but about 100 of the 7,000 comments were one paragraph “written in crayon,” he joked. “Some of these people really went off the deep end.” Fortunately for his side, the serious objections -- numbering about 50 -- “kind of got lost” in the flood of “knee-jerk” opposition. Public safety and federal agencies posed legitimate concerns, Lazarus said. Unfortunately, BPL operators didn’t get their own positions straight and “got in each others’ way.”

As usual, the FCC’s issuing rules is just the opening gun, Lazarus said. The issue is “going to have a long run,” with the Commission handling interference complaints and needing to sign off on each device, not to mention FCC reconsideration of the rules or a U.S. Appeals Court, D.C., challenge, or both.

The good regulatory news for BPL is that “for the most part, there’s really nothing new,” said Current gen. counsel Jerry Birnbaum. Preexisting FCC and state frameworks can largely handle the whole issue, he said. Birnbaum said his company has engineered so successfully to avert interference that it has received no complaints on that score.

Outspoken Cal. PUC member Susan Kennedy said she had become a “big believer” in BPL not long after having passed up a spot on a joint federal task force on the technology because she thought BPL was so far off as to be a waste of her time. “BPL should be a major policy goal for regulators and policy-makers.” Wireless and satellite broadband may never pose effective competition broadly to the cable-telco high-speed duopoly, she said. The beauty of exploiting the “near ubiquitous infrastructure already in place” for electricity is that it’s perfect for areas that are underserved and considered uneconomic by other providers. The price pressure BPL could supply would be key to proliferating broadband to populations where adoption remains low, Kennedy said.

The PUC feels “a sense of urgency” to support the technology, she said. That’s a switch from last year, when the commission asserted, in the FCC rulemaking, a substantial state regulatory role.

“It’s a crime that California, home to Silicon Valley, does not have a BPL project, and I want to change that,” Kennedy said. AT&T pulled the plug on its venture with Pacific Gas & Electric last year, she said. Kennedy said she’s “extremely supportive” of a pilot announced by San Diego Gas & Electric and urges the state’s other 2 big private electric utilities, PG&E and Southern Cal. Edison, to follow suit. She didn’t mention L.A.’s Dept. of Water & Power, the municipal utility.

Kennedy said she planned to start a rulemaking whereby the PUC would remove uncertainty by answering in advance many questions about how it would treat BPL. She said an electric-utility executive had told her at dinner the night before the event that the “biggest impediment is a regulatory environment filled with risk.” After extensive proceedings to gain approvals, a company could find the PUC suddenly changing the rules any time, she said. “My mouth dropped open” as he ticked off the levels of commission scrutiny of such a project, Kennedy said.

A PUC advanced-metering decision coming within months could determine the climate for BPL for years, Kennedy said. Utilities are spending a fortune sending out meter readers and doing true-ups on billing of unread meters, she said. The Cal. electric-deregulation crisis put the PUC under great pressure for advanced meter deployment, and the commission in turn is pushing the utilities. “Our electric utilities don’t even know there’s an outage until some poor shmo calls and says the lights are out,” Kennedy said. BPL would let the companies dim electricity instead of blacking it to control voltage to a grid area, she added.

The Current-Cinergy BPL operation in the Cincinnati area is getting ready to deploy VoIP with quality of service late this year, Birnbaum has said. Voice packets will get priority over data to prevent call deterioration during heavy network traffic periods, he said. The outfit sees opportunities in IPTV and video on demand, though not competing as a full-blown cable over-builder, he said. Customers are getting 4-6 Mbps actual, or “net speeds,” and a new generation of chips for customer equipment, available in a few months, will provide 15-20, Birnbaum said. The chips cost $8, so embedding them like Wi-Fi inside computers instead of separate modems would be economical, and will eventually happen, he said.

DSL and cable operators have boosted speeds and are trying to match pricing in response to BPL, Birnbaum said. Over half the new service’s customers come from DSL or cable, but 40% move up from dial-up, illustrating the opportunity to expand the broadband pie instead of just cannibalizing, he said. With 50,000 homes passed, the BPL operation has generated no complaints about the outside equipment installed, which is often obscured, Birnbaum said.

But it’s utility automation that really sparks electric companies’ interest in BPL, Birnbaum said. They can be notified of outages immediately, monitor power quality for preventive maintenance, vary pricing by time of day on the fly, and mechanize meter reading -- “that’s probably the killer app for utilities.” A BPL-enabled electric meter is coming next month, he said.