There are presently four basic ways to get internet access. There’s dial-up through phone lines, still used in rural areas, airports, and hotel rooms. We all know how painfully slow dial-up can be, even with the various “accelerators” touted by Internet Service Providers. Speaking of these accelerators, they don’t really speed up the connection over the phone line. They work in the background to compress and decompress information being sent and received, so that more information can be sent over the same speed line. The upside of dial-up is that, unless you live in areas with prehistoric phone lines, you can at least get a connection to check your email, regardless of how far you live/work from “civilization”.

There’s DSL (Digital Subscriber Line), which also uses phone lines, but in order to get high speed you need to live within 18,000 feet of a central phone switch. Again, great if you live in town.

There’s cable modems, which use the same lines as cable TV connections, and can provide service to areas that DSL can’t reach.

And, finally, there are satellite-dish-based solutions, which are “environmentally temperamental” – they don’t work well sometimes in heavy snow and rain (which we fortunately don’t have to deal with here in Maine). They’re also expensive when compared to the above solutions.

But hope for affordable “Broadband In The Boonies” may come from a device used every day in every home – the electrical outlet. The technology is called B.P.L. You guessed it – Broadband over Power Lines. It’s a simple concept. Digital data is transmitted over the electric lines already coming into the home. You simply plug a B.P.L. modem into an electrical outlet, attach the modem to your computer with a USB or Ethernet cable, or go directly into a wireless router.

The technology has been around for a long time. Concerns over frequency interference have slowed widespread deployment, but the bugs have been ironed out enough to allow test programs involving about 5,000 customers in 18 states. Customers in the Cincinnati area are paying $30 to $50 per month for B.P.L, depending on connection speed. These prices are competitive with DSL and cable modem plans.

There are also benefits for the Electric Company. B.P.L. can be used to monitor and troubleshoot electric lines, manage power demands, and replace “meter readers”. Which is great, unless you’re a meter reader.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski