From today’s Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star:
“Manassas has become the first city in America where every family can access high-speed Internet service simply by plugging into a common electrical wall socket. … The technology being put to use in Manassas is called broadband over power line (BPL) and it carries data over the city’s electrical grid. … Customers are provided with a modem to plug into their home electrical sockets.”
The service costs $28.95 per month — less than what the cable and DSL typically costs. Where the technology could prove to be really significant is in rural areas where broadband service doesn’t exist at all. Said Joseph E. Gerus, CEO of Communications Technologies Inc. , the Chantilly telecommunications company involved with the project: “What we are announcing today in Manassas is something that we could be rolling out in a year or two in literally scores of communities across the United States.”
Presumably, they’re paying attention down in Southside, where installing a broadband network is a high priority — and public money is available to fund it. The Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission, underwritten by tobacco settlement funds, is committing $21 million to bring broadband to six new communities: Dinwiddie, Appomattox, Bedford, South Hill, Martinsville and Danville. (See article in the Petersburg Progress-Index.)
They aren’t using the Manassas technology in Southside, but I’m wondering if Broadband Over Power Line might drive down the cost of extending broadband access beyond the mill-town population clusters to dispersed residents in the countryside. I’d bet there are a number of rural electrical cooperatives that would love to diversify their revenue stream.
