[1st-mile-nm] BPL challenges
Andrew Cohill
cohill at designnine.com
Tue Apr 8 08:22:41 PDT 2008
I spoke to a rural electric coop recently that has been experimenting
with BPL from several vendors for three years, and is still not able
to get more than a couple hundred kilobits of bandwidth when the
distances are more than a mile or two from the transformer. Bandwidth
issues aside, a weakness of BPL appears to be that a wide area
deployment can cost a significant fraction of what you would spend for
fiber or a hybrid fiber/wireless deployment.
We're working on a project right now with a public electric utility
that has decided to run fiber to substations in its rural areas and
then deply WiMax both for broadband but also for electric power
management and meter reading, using low power wireless close to the
home for the meter reading stuff.
In an open services network, the electric utility can become an anchor
tenant for AMI/AMR services.
Andrew
On Apr 7, 2008, at 11:56 PM, Dale Carstensen wrote:
>
> The xcel energy and current group BPL (Broadband over Power
> Lines) stuff seems to me to be not BPL, but rather NPL (Narrowband
> over Power Lines) for such purposes as remote meter reading,
> distribution control (hmm, probably security problems here,
> come to think of it, maybe financial chicanery could happen
> with the meter reading, too) and management of non-utility
> power generation (customers of power utilities selling
> photovoltaic or wind or biomass electrical generation back
> to the grid).
-------------------------------------------------
Andrew Michael Cohill, Ph.D.
President
Design Nine, Inc.
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