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First hyped in the mid- to late-'90s, broadband over power line, or BPL, is currently enjoying a big wave of renewed interest. In Manassas, 700 households are already using BPL, and another 500 customers have signed up for the service, according to the provider, Chantilly, Virginia-based Communication Technologies. The company shares revenue from the service with the city of Manassas, which owns the electric utility. Customers plug a BPL modem into any electrical wall socket, and send data over the city's electrical wires to substations. The substations are connected to the net by city-owned fiber-optic cables. Because the data travels at higher frequencies than electrical current, the two do not interfere with each other. That's one of the issues that has slowed BPL adoption, said Joe Laszlo, research director at Jupiter Research who covers broadband. A number of BPL trials around the country "have been canceled or scaled back because of interference issues," he said, "or because the cost of deploying was much higher than the utilities expected." "BPL isn't necessarily an ideal end-to-end solution," he said, "but one that can play a role along with technologies like wireless and fiber optics to bridge the last mile."
