« Dispatch from Prince George - The Oil Economy | Home | The Myth of Work-Life Balance »

Dispatch from Quesnel - Broadband Over Powerline

By crooky | June 10, 2008

This evening, I rest my reary haunches at a hotel in Quesnel. My day of fame and misfortune in Prince George over, I arrive at my hotel at the South end of Quesnel and am handed, along with my room key, a Broadband over Powerline (BPL) modem. I was dumbfounded. I’ve read about these things but to hold one in my hands - it’s like finding Mint Snapple at the corner store.

If you haven’t heard of BPL, it’s a sad tale. Many a company during the dot com era went tits up trying to commercialize it for use with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) - including Enron (yes, that Enron). BPL was at one time destined to take its place alongside cable modems and DSL - the two most common broadband technologies found in North American homes.

Here’s how the technology works:

There are two types of electricity that gets thrown around your neighbourhood - there’s high frequency electricity and there’s low frequency electricity. (And yes my nerdy friends, I know it’s not really called high “frequency” electricity - I used to work for BC Hydro. We’re talking about specific properties of electricity for those readers who don’t know what IEEE stands for.)

High frequency electricity is usually transported to your city by a transmission company (or a transmission division without your local electricity company) at a very high voltage on high tension wires. There’s no relation between frequency and voltage but it’s worth noting that tranmission power usually runs at 10-30 Mhz while the power that comes out of your wall sockets at home operates at 60 Hz.

Without getting into the complete history of electricity, frequency and telecommunications, let’s just say that higher frequencies equals more bandwidth (potential to transmit data) a system has. Since our electrical system runs on alternating current (AC), this is a suitable carrier wave for data transmission. The alternating part of alternating current can be modified slightly by a BPL system to transmit 1s and 0s without significantly affecting the quality of the power being transmitted.

There is a residential-grade version that works with the lower frequency electricity (120 volt AC) that runs through the walls of most North American homes. This is apparently what my hotel has. You plug the model into any power outlet and you plug your computer into the modem using a normal ethernet cable. Voila! BPL!

The home/apartment building market is the only area where BPL has had any commercial success. You can buy consumer-grade hardware for your own home that allows you to use your in-wall electricity wiring instead of network cables. In this case, you would plug your cable or DSL modem into a BPL unit that acts as a router. You get the signal out of any socket in your home by plugging in another adapter.

The uptake on this technology has been, I suspect due to the proliferation of WiFi in the consumer market, pretty weak. One of the problems is that there are competing BPL low-frequency standards that are not interoperable. You can’t necessarily buy one BPL unit from one manufacturer and another from a different manufacturer and expect them to play nice the way that 802.11 B/G/N WiFi technology does.

I suspect that if BPL had beaten mass adoption of WiFi for home use to the market, it would be much more popular than it is today. This is why I was rather surprized to find BPL in use at the Sandman Inn in Quesnel, BC. It works fine but it’s a bit of an oddball technology that has few advantages over WiFi.

High-frequency BPL is a sham, pure and simple. It’s been called by some “a system for seperating venture capitalists from their money”. Low-frequency BPL may have a future however. Keep an eye out for it.

To learn more about low-frequency BPL, check out the HomePlug Powerline Alliance.

*********************
Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.

Share/Save/Bookmark

Topics: Technology |

Comments