The once-futuristic idea of electricity lines serving as a gateway to the Internet has become a reality, although the technology has yet to demonstrate the kind of breakthrough advantages over telephone and cable television services that will grab the attention of demanding consumers.
A report released Thursday predicted that 2005 might be the year that so-called broadband power-line technology breaks through and becomes a third option for computer users whose high-speed connectivity options are cable modems or DSL.
"It is being embraced by consumers and there is increasing interest in it from the utilities," said Joe Fergus, president of Communications Technologies, a firm that has launched BPL service in Manassas, Va. "It's still a young technology, but it is moving beyond the theoretical realm into actual deployment."
BPL operates in muc h the same way that DSL and cable operate. The signal is carried along existing power lines and emerges through any standard electric outlet into a modem that is plugged into the socket.
The current speeds are around 500 kilobytes to 1 megabyte per second, although some of the world's major modem producers are developing technology capable of 100 million megabytes per second.
Fergus and other advocates of BPL base their pitch for the technology on the relative ease in which it can be hooked up and the subscription price of around $30 per month compared to cable and DSL that are usually more expensive.
"It is more affordable and it comes over a service (electric utilities) that most people trust," Fergus added during a conference call announcing the release of the report from the New Millennium Research Council in Washington.
The report concluded that there was little standing in the way of a large-scale growth spurt for BPL that would benefit consumers in the form of a low-cost alternative to other high-speed data lines and the ability to hook up houses virtually anywhere in the United States and not just major urban markets.
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