Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Tilting at Power Lines

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Jan 2003 17:17:07 -0500

Tilting at Power Lines
Christopher Helman, 01.20.03

For years electric companies have dreamed of making their wires the high-speed data pipe
to your PC. One tech company may yet make the dream possible.
When Joseph Marsilii first heard that engineers had finally figured out an economical way
to send high-speed data over electrical power lines, he told colleagues, "No way. This
doesn't work." That was 2000, when Marsilii was president of the retail energy division of
Potomac Electric Power, where he had worked for 20 years. Utilities had spent decades
fruitlessly attempting ways to provide data to homes and businesses over their ubiquitous
wires.

Marsilii is now a believer. He changed his mind two years ago when he saw a working system
devised by a fledgling Israeli firm called Main.net Communications. He left his job to
head up Main.net's U.S. operations. With the fervor of a convert, he's urging utilities
across the country to build data-delivery systems on their power grids.

Main.net's gear already serves 10,000 European homes at speeds of 500 kilobits a second,
roughly equal to average cable and digital subscriber line (DSL) speeds, but a tenfold
increase over standard dial-up modems. Half of those customers are commercial users,
paying $30 a month. Service started in Mannheim, Germany in 2001 and has since spread to
the Netherlands, Sweden and Austria.

In the U.S. a dozen utilities, including Ohio's American Electric Power (nyse: AEP - news
- people ) and New York's Consolidated Edison (nyse: ED - news - people ), are running
small tests of the technology at anywhere from 3 to 250 homes each. Pennsylvania's PPL
(nyse: PPL - news - people ), St. Louis-based Ameren (nyse: AEE - news - people ) and the
city of Manassas, Va. hope to launch commercial service this year.

Yet Main.net and its handful of competitors still face a potential showstopper: tremendous
excess capacity paired with the public's unwillingness to pay up for zippy connections in
the home. The Federal Communications Commission figures that cable modems are available to
71% of U.S. homes, DSL, to at least 50%. Yet only 6.2 million homes, or 15% of the total,
have signed up for high-speed Internet connections.

To supplant cable and DSLthe power companies have to offer a service that's vastly cheaper
and faster. So far it is neither (see table below). A cable modem connection costs the
provider $225 per subscriber to set up, a DSL costs $350. In Europe Main.net has set up
networks for $300 per subscriber. Main.net concedes that those costs would rise to about
$400 in the U.S., where homes are more dispersed. David Lineweber of research firm Primen
is more cautious: Figure on $700, he says.

Power line communication's first battleground looks to be Manassas, Va. The city already
has a fiber-optic network in place, built in 1995 with the aim of luring Internet service
providers to hook up citizens with low-cost Internet. Antonella Miller is one of the 15
residents testing the system since May. She says speeds are comparable with those of her
outage-prone Comcast cable modem, and faster than the DSL hookup at her job. "If offered,
we would go for it, but we wouldn't want to pay more than $40 a month," she says.

.blue{color: #08195a;}
High-Speed Chase
Utilities are many laps behind cable and DSL in the race to deliver broadband. Their only
hope is to cut the price per month.

 U.S.
subscribers U.S.
homes
passed Real-world
data rate
(kilobits/second)

Cable modem 10.6 mil 75 mil 400-1,000

DSL 5.1 mil 50 mil 500-1,500

Satellite 247,000 NA 150-1,200

Fixed wireless 45,000 500,000 128-1,500

Power line 500* 2,500 200-500

Verizon (nyse: VZ - news - people ), which has spent billions building its DSL networks,
says the technology is interesting, but it's still in its infancy and doesn't pose a
threat. After all, the phone network was built to carry information, the power grid
wasn't.

Power lines are extremely hostile places for data signals, with high levels of electronic
noise and an obstacle course of transformers, surge arrestors and splices that create a
huge impedance to the free flow of high-frequency signals. Over the years Nortel (nyse: NT
- news - people ), Honeywell (nyse: HON - news - people ), Scientific-Atlanta (nyse: SFA -
news - people ) and Siemens (nyse: SI - news - people ) all tried--and failed--to devise
reliable power line networks.

The premise is deceptively simple. Transfer data packets from long-haul fiber-optic
networks to the electrical power grid and shoot the data (alongside electricity) straight
into people's homes. DSL technology uses a similar trick, forcing data packets to ride the
weak electrical current that accompanies voice signals on the phone line.

But electricity on the utilities' grid courses at a searingly high 60,000 to 500,000 volts
while it travels hundreds of miles over transmission lines to populated areas. Substations
and transformer boxes eventually reduce the power to the 110 volts that toast your muffin
in the morning, but the electrical noise on a high-voltage line can destroy data signals
immediately. Simply boosting the signal power to drown out the noise doesn't work. Nortel
tried that in the late 1990s in the U.K., but the signals were so juiced up they turned
metal street lamps into broadcast antennas, interfering with military and airplane radios.

Main.net's system skips the high-voltage lines, injecting data into the grid further
downstream, on medium-voltage (4,000 to 25,000 volts) lines. There, a piece of hardware
called the concentrator unit plucks the data off a fiber-optic network, reformulates it
into a signal at 2 to 30 megahertz and injects that signal onto the power line.

To counteract data loss, Main.net's cofounder and head scientist, Schaike Zalitsky, built
on techniques used to beam cell phone calls through the noisy air. In the widely used
cellular protocol known as code division multiple access, or CDMA, data are chopped up
into dozens of small, duplicate data packets and blasted out over a range of frequencies.
The idea is that even if some packets get lost amid the noise, enough will slip through to
be reassembled as a coherent signal at the destination.

Main.net uses a related technology called direct sequence spread spectrum, or DSSS, to
send its signals down the power line. Signals can make it only so far before breaking
apart, so Main.net uses electronic devices called repeaters that sit on the lines and
continuously catch the Internet signals, recompose and bolster them, and shoot them out
again. Main.net has found that even in the noisiest electrical environments, such as
neighborhood transformers, there are always big enough gaps in the radio spectrum for
repeaters to push a signal through.

So far Main.net is the only firm to publicly claim the ability to push data through a
transformer. Top competitors Ambient (otc: ABTG - news - people ) and Amperion, both in
the Boston area, use more elaborate coupling techniques that detour the signal around the
transformer. But for now their systems are uneconomical.

Main.net's most ambitious test in the U.S. is at 250 homes served by PPL (formerly
Pennsylvania Power & Light) in Allentown, Pa. Like Manassas, the Allentown area is
surrounded by fiber that PPL laid to facilitate communications between offices and
substations. PPL leases excess bandwidth to Internet service providers but wants to use
more of the fiber to build power line networks in the communities along the ring.
Commercial service could be ready in six months.

"We're enthusiastic, but not Pollyannas, either," says Alan Richenbacher, special projects
manager for PPL. "It really fits with the fact that we have all this unused fiber." PPL's
network could be economical even if only 15% of the 1,500 homes passed subscribed at $30
per month.

Utilities hope that other uses for power line networking could help subsidize Internet
service. Though some electric companies already can read meters remotely, the majority
still send a worker out to tromp through yards and read the dials at an average cost of 60
cents to $1 per visit. A $40 Web-enabled meter could pay for itself in three years.
Webcams and sensors mounted on utility poles can provide security at substations and
notify the utility if power goes out. Once a home is wired, utilities could turn down
power-gobbling appliances, like air conditioners, ahead of summer brownouts. And if a
family doesn't pay the bills, a utility could give them just enough power for necessities
like a refrigerator and a few lights. But no TV.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2003/0120/087.html?_requestid=3873&_requestid=12843

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---

From: "Todd Ellis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Jan 2003 21:08:19 -0500

Good article.  I know Joe Marsilii.  The only real problem is that the data
rates they are talking about aren't reality.  They are actually only passing
150 KB in Manasas, and they need a LOT of repeaters.  To give you an idea of
how many, one resident had a large house - and needed a repeater placed
right outside to be able to reach computers at the far side of the house.
There's a few really big homes down here (12,000+ square feet), but it seems
ludicrous to have to need that many repeaters to access the net at lower
speed.  What Joe is reaching for is the 500 kb to 1 mb speed barrier, and
the Israelis have their sites on 55 megabits using their technologies.  Now
THAT's something I would like to see.  Otherwise, I'd rather talk about
fiber to the home.

Todd Ellis
  -----Original Message-----
  From: Marcel [mailto:[email-masked]]
  Sent: Monday, January 06, 2003 5:17 PM
  To: [email-masked]
  Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Tilting at Power Lines

  Tilting at Power Lines

  For years electric companies have dreamed of making their wires the
high-speed data pipe
  to your PC. One tech company may yet make the dream possible.
  When Joseph Marsilii first heard that engineers had finally figured out an
economical way
  to send high-speed data over electrical power lines, he told colleagues,
"No way. This
  doesn't work." That was 2000, when Marsilii was president of the retail
energy division of
  Potomac Electric Power, where he had worked for 20 years. Utilities had
spent decades
  fruitlessly attempting ways to provide data to homes and businesses over
their ubiquitous
  wires.

---

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2003 05:22:39 -0500

That is why I don't subscribe to Hype.com. Data speeds are always misleading to the
average Joe. Data Speeds, Throughput, Compression  are the buzzzz terms used to confuse
consumers. Show me the real time data........

Todd Ellis wrote:

>  Good article.  I know Joe Marsilii.  The only real problem is that the data rates they
> are talking about aren't reality.  They are actually only passing 150 KB in Manasas, and
> they need a LOT of repeaters.  To give you an idea of how many, one resident had a large
> house - and needed a repeater placed right outside to be able to reach computers at the
> far side of the house.  There's a few really big homes down here (12,000+ square feet),
> but it seems ludicrous to have to need that many repeaters to access the net at lower
> speed.  What Joe is reaching for is the 500 kb to 1 mb speed barrier, and the Israelis
> have their sites on 55 megabits using their technologies.  Now THAT's something I would
> like to see.  Otherwise, I'd rather talk about fiber to the home.Todd Ellis
>
>                    Yahoo! Groups Sponsor
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>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.

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