BPL Not Well Suited For Rural Broadband Deployment Says NRTC Study
In a setback for BPL technology, a soon-to-be- released National Rural Telecom Co-op (NRTC) study concluded BPL isn’t appropriate for “sparsely-populated rural” broadband and utility applications. One of BPL’s advantages touted by the industry is its ability to provide broadband to rural and underserved communities that aren’t covered by DSL or cable modem, because power lines reach virtually every household. BPL’s ability to reach rural areas is also the subject of investigation by NARUC’s BPL Task Force.
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NRTC undertook 2 pilots with West Fla. Electric Co-op and Southern Md. Electric Co-op to test BPL’s performance on rural feeders, with emphasis on speed, latency and network functionality. The Fla. trial had be discontinued because the vendor had trouble delivering equipment. The Md. trial, with equipment provided by Current Technologies, which has rolled out commercial BPL in Cincinnati, proved to be technology that could serve only a mile or 2 in length, Steve Collier, NRTC vp-emerging technologies told us. Collier offered only to provide an “overview” of the report, which is slated for release in Feb.
Collier said the BPL signal could be repeated only twice on the rural line and “after that it basically is not particularly usable in bandwidth or network management.” That led NRTC to conclude that while it may work well in densely populated urban areas, the technology isn’t going to be a “great asset for long, rural feeders.” So for people at the outer edges of a utility’s service area, satellite will continue to the solution, he added. “You couldn’t afford to build BPL even if it performed well to get to them.” Even NRTC telephone members, who have built out 90% of their access lines with DSL, rely on wireless or satellite to reach the rest of their service areas, Collier said.
The results aren’t encouraging either for BPL’s use in internal applications for rural cooperatives. Because the signal doesn’t travel very far, BPL wouldn’t be appropriate for utility applications, Collier said. Other less expensive power line carrier technologies exist for such services, he added. Besides the cost of having repeaters every half mile, reliability issues arose with 40 signal regenerators on a 20-mile long feeder, he said: “If one goes out, everything downstream of that is out of service until you find it and replace it.” Also, each repeat of the signal causes loss of bandwidth and increase in latency, he said, that “at some point gets to be unacceptable.”
The study by no means suggests BPL doesn’t work, he said: “It suggests as a technology it is not well suited to long, sparsely populated rural applications.” Some NRTC members who have housing subdivisions with some consumer density and want to get into the ISP business might want to use BPL, Collier said: “But to cover an entire rural system with long sparsely populated areas, we are pretty convinced that it [BPL] is not solution in the foreseeable future.”
Collier said he had briefed the NARUC BPL Task Force in the past on its study, although there’s no official agreement with the group. The state regulators will be briefed again on the finding of the study, he added.