Cities Choose Wireless Over BPL in Broadband Deployments
State laws banning or restricting municipal entry into the communications business and aggressive marketing by wireless have resulted in municipalities passing over BPL for broadband deployments, officials said. Only 8 of the 30 BPL trials or commercial deployments are being done by municipal utilities, according to the United Power Line Council (UPLC). This is despite the fact that it’s a lot easier for municipalities to move on BPL than investor-owned utilities, said UPLC Regulatory Dir. Brett Kilbourne.
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.
Municipal utilities tend to have small and compact service territories and aren’t motivated by profit, said Kilbourne. But for municipalities it’s “superficially easier” to do wireless than BPL, he said. Besides, they are being “approached very aggressively by the wireless mesh folks,” he added. For instance, he said, EarthLink, which is involved in a couple of BPL projects, has been very aggressive in getting municipalities to adopt wireless.
On the regulatory front, outright bans or restrictions on provision of broadband has led to municipal reluctance to embrace BPL, he said. Some 15 states have such laws. Neb., which is served entirely by public power utilities, enacted a law in 2005 prohibiting any broadband operations by municipalities, he said: “That acts as a blanket ban across the state.” Utilities and some ISPs are backing a referendum to overturn the law, he said. The UPLC hasn’t aggressively tried to sell BPL to municipalities, but municipal utilities that have used BPL “have come back and said they are pretty satisfied,” he added.
Municipal utilities generally don’t venture into the broadband business unless consumers want it, said Mike Hyland, vp-engineering of the American Public Power Assn. If citizens aren’t complaining about the services of cable or DSL providers, utilities have no incentive to get into that business, he said. Manassas, Va., chose to experiment with BPL because it was the “new emerging technology” when there were complaints about private providers’ service, he said. But the city also had issues with the technology. “When you start getting into issues of voice and video-on-demand, it [BPL] becomes not as technologically advanced as people want today.”
Many municipalities opting to get into broadband would want to be more “adaptable,” and so would prefer to stay with a Wi-Mesh system, he added: “That way you don’t get the slower download situation where you can’t get the voice and the video-on-demand.” BPL will continue to meet the “niche” needs of municipalities like Manassas, he said. The overarching regulatory issue for municipalities is state laws banning or restricting their entry into broadband business, Hyland said.
Kilbourne said it’s a “positive sign” that state regulators want to help the industry “when and if we ask for it.” The reason utilities haven’t approached regulators in big numbers, he said, is “you don’t want to raise expectations before you are actually ready to deploy.” Typically if there’s a BPL bill cropping up in a state, he said, it’s a “pretty sure sign” that an investor-owned utility (IOU) is serious about deployment. PUC regulations don’t affect municipally owned utilities and cooperatives, he added. He said it’s “somewhat true” that there’s likely to be more “smart-grid” BPL deployments in the near future rather than commercial broadband. Smart grids will drive IOU adoption of BPL, he said, but there’s also a lot of interest among them to get 3rd-party BPL providers to use their lines and provide broadband service.