Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Is PLC Broadband Set To Become Manassas, Third?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 23:45:12 -0400

Is PLC Broadband Set To Become Manassas, Third?

The otherwise sleepy town of Manassas, Va., is best known as a historic
battlefield. Twice, the Civil War raged over its hills and pastures. In the
early days of the war, the Union Army was routed, convincing President
Lincoln that what had been expected to be a quick decisive war would be
anything but. A little over a year later, Confederate Generals Lee and
Jackson again drove the Union Army back to Bull Run in what almost became a
repeat of the earlier disaster.

To avoid confusion, history has designated the two battles Manassas, First
and Second. Now, whether the townsfolk know it or not, they are about to
become embroiled in a third battle of Manassas, over the future of powerline
communications or, as the FCC keeps calling it, broadband over power lines.

One of several scattered trials of PLC has been going on in Manassas for
some time now. The city's public utility has run a limited test covering a
handful of residences and a single business, a downtown architectural firm
that runs seven networked computers off the connection. The trial uses
technology from Reston, Va.-based Main.net Power Line Communications Inc.
 with funding assistance from the American Public Power Association (APPA).

So far everyone has seemed thrilled with the results. Users praise the
service's speed and ease of use, and APPA routinely cites those happy
customers when talking about the potential for PLC. Now the city itself is
saying that it's ready to expand the service beyond the trial stage and
offer a full-blown commercial PLC service throughout Manassas.

Utility Director Allan Todd described his scenario for the Washington Post.
Todd said the publicly owned utility hopes to find a partner that would add
the needed bypass equipment to the city's 2,000 transformers, offer service
and do the billing, and give the city a sizable cut of a monthly cost he
estimated at $20 to $30 for unlimited usage. Interested parties have until
Sept. 8 to make a bid. After that, the City Council will decide whether or
not to go ahead. If all is well, the city would like to have the service up
and running by the end of the year.

So, at this point, it's still far from clear whether or not the city project
will go ahead. But it would be a very good thing for all concerned -- even
PLC's enemies -- if it did.

Manassas is a compact little town. The utility has about 14,000 customers
within a 10-square-mile area. While it's no longer precisely a rural
community, it's a reasonable analogue of the kind of small, rural markets
where BPL is anticipated to play its leading role. More to the point, it's
compact enough for the service to be offered as it stands. That could make
it a key laboratory as the FCC goes through the increasingly contentious
process of deciding if it should relax emissions limits to allow PLC to be
more widely used.

So far, largely because it's been confined to small, relatively quiet
trials, there are far more questions than answers about how PLC would really
operate in the real market. Even when trial participants talk about what
they're doing, the results aren't especially applicable to the big picture.

Of course trial participants love the service. It's easy to make something
run like clockwork when you've got two or three technicians for each end
user spending all day polishing the chrome and tweaking the last kilobit per
second out of the equipment. And it doesn't hurt that it's free. Expanding
to a real, citywide, commercial deployment will give PLC a chance to show
whether it can produce the same results on a large scale, when it's going to
have to largely run on its own. It will help generate data on usage and
traffic loads. It will help determine whether PLC's presumed play for the
lower end broadband customer accelerates dial-up migration or just
cannibalizes the existing base.

And it will do most of these things in public. That's why opponents of PLC
interference should be eager to see something like this as well. If
interference is going to be a problem for other RF applications, than a real
example system will prove that as well. Are there any ham radio operators in
Manassas? There must be at least a couple. If not, the American Radio Relay
League will surely relocate one there to track and record the impact of the
PLC system.

Basically, setting up a full-blown system will take a lot of the debate over
PLC out of the realm of conjecture and provide actual examples for all sides
to point to -- a convenient driving distance from Washington D.C., and the
FCC's headquarters as it turns out.

It seems likely that the FCC will still be debating the issue well into next
year. If that's the case, pretty much everyone involved will descend on
Manassas. There'll be other utilities using Manassas' experience to help
decide if they should proceed with their own projects. There'll be radio
operators with equipment busily measuring and recording RF interference.
There'll even be PLC equipment vendors with their own little boxes gathering
data on the competition's equipment.

All in all, Manassas could be in for the biggest influx of strangers in 140
years. Let's just hope that, this time, nobody gets killed...

http://www.wirelesstoday.com/broadband/last_word.htm
http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/plc
http://www.powerline-plc.com
http://www.appanet.org

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