Rural Electric Coops Likely to Use BPL-Satellite Combination
Rural electric cooperatives likely will use a “patchwork” of technologies such as broadband over power line (BPL) and satellite rather than build out BPL alone for Internet operations, said Steven Collier, vp-emerging technologies for the National Rural Telecom Coop (NRTC). With pilot projects in Fla. and Md., the NRTC is running a BPL study, with a report on results expected this month. NARUC’s BPL Task Force, studying BPL’s potential to fill rural broadband holes, will use the NRTC results to make recommendations.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
Collier told us the study aims to gauge a BPL system’s performance on a rural feeder, with emphasis on speed, latency and network functionality. “We weren’t attempting to prove out economics or do a field trial or any of that sort of thing,” he said: “It was to be able to say, ‘Here is how far you can reasonably expect to reach with this [BPL] technology along a distribution feeder and still have acceptable performance.'”
BPL is a “very interesting” concept for rural utilities, Collier said, but “I don’t how many of our rural electric cooperatives would actually get into the ISP business.” Many likely would act as landlords, leasing lines to ISPs, he said. Few cooperatives are pursuing BPL because “it’s still a very early stage business,” Collier said. A couple of BPL trials by cooperatives haven’t gone commercial yet, he added.
As for internal utility uses, on which the BPL equipment industry is banking as a spur to utility embrace of the technology, Collier said while it interests rural utilities, internal applications such as automatic meter reading are “fairly low bandwidth applications.” Most electric coops use slower power line carrier technologies known as PWACS and Turtle for functions like meter reading. “The expense of building out broadband over long rural distribution lines just for internal applications is prohibitive,” he said.
If BPL were available throughout an electric cooperative’s service area, it might use BPL for internal tasks, Collier said, but “it’s unlikely that it would build out broadband solely for the purpose of internal applications.”
Little Internet-enabled distribution gear is available for internal uses, Collier said. Single-phase residential meters that would hook up to BPL aren’t readily available, for instance. Making them work requires a modem, boosting costs, he added. But as more equipment is available for metering and internal utility controls, “that may move this [BPL] along a bit.”
Satellite broadband would work for rural areas unlikely to see facilities-based solutions such as DSL, fiber, cable or BPL any time soon, said Collier. Satellite with capacity limitations and “some latency” is an “edge play,” he said: “But if it’s all you've got in the middle of nowhere it looks pretty good.” A rural electric coop likely would use satellite on the edges, with BPL, he said: “You can’t justify building BPL all the way out.”