Energy execs debate future of broadband over power lines
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Energy executives whose organizations are pioneering the delivery of broadband-over-power-line services see potential in new consumer revenue streams and utility applications such as real-time grid monitoring.
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Electric companies may soon join the fray of providing Internet services after regulators cleared the way for utility companies to offer broadband services through electrical outlets, according to a report published Friday.
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The long-promised battle between U.S.  cable and telephone companies has so far been more of an uneasy  peace. Thanks to their duopoly over broadband Internet access,  it may stay that way.
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Competition may not fix problems with broadband speed and cost in the U.S., because of the high cost of entry into the market, the leader of a technology think tank said Friday.
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Utilities view broadband over power line (BPL) services not only as an enabler of new revenue but as a benefactor of internal operations as well.
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Converged communications watchdog Ofcom is proposing BT more than halve its prices for making its last-mile copper telephone network available to competing broadband providers.
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One of the major questions as the U.S. Federal Communications Commission kicks off a multibillion-dollar spectrum auction Thursday is whether the auction will produce a winning bidder that will challenge telecom and cable-based broadband providers with a national wireless broadband network.Other questions will also be answered in coming weeks as the auctions, for 62MHz of long-range, high-speed spectrum, unfold. Will Google or another bidder buy enough spectrum to launch a &quot;third pipe&quot; broadband network? Will any bidders step forward and pledge to build a nationwide broadband and voice network for emergency response agencies?The bids to watch in the 700MHz auctions are for the C block, a 22MHz band of spectrum broken up into 12 regional licenses, and the D block, 10MHz of auctioned spectrum paired with another 10MHz set aside for a combined national commercial/emergency response agency network. Startup Frontline Wireless, one of the primary backers of the public-private model for an emergency responder network, announced in December that&#160;it had ceased operations.&quot;The pull-out of Frontline leaves the whole D Block auction up in the air,&quot; analyst Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates said in an e-mail. &quot;There is no way to know if a last-minute group will come on board. While the goal of establishing a universal network for public safety/security is a laudable goal, it is not the most lucrative area from a pure business perspective, so it is not clear how much demand there might be or who might step up to the plate to make this work.&quot;The FCC may have made a mistake in adopting the plan by Frontline, a company with former FCC chairman Reed Hundt as its vice chairman, said Carlyn Taylor, a senior managing director in business consultancy FTI&#39;s corporate finance practice.&quot;I&#39;m not sure how well [Frontline&#39;s plan] hung together from a financial standpoint,&quot; Taylor said. &quot;I&#39;m not sure anybody else is going to try to do what Frontline says they were going to do. There doesn&#39;t seem to be anybody else with a similar approach.&quot;If any other company bids on the D block, it will be much less than the FCC would have received without the national public safety network build-out rules, Taylor said.But the Public Safety Spectrum Trust (PSST), the nonprofit group of emergency response agency representatives that&#160;controls the public safety portion of the spectrum, said earlier this month it continues to support the FCC plan for the D block. The FCC should &quot;do all that it can&quot; to advance the public-private partnership meant to bring about the nationwide public safety broadband network, said Harlin McEwen, the PSST&#39;s chairman, in a statement. &quot;While it would not be appropriate for the PSST to comment on any potential bidder&#8217;s strategy, we want to restate our enthusiasm for and commitment to what the FCC has done.&quot;In the C block, the FCC required that&#160;winning bidders operate under open-access rules, meaning the winning bidder must allow any legal devices to connect to the network and allow customers to access any legal Web content of their choosing. Google, which pushed for the open-access rules, has&#160;pledged to bid at least $4.6 billion for the C block, and the FCC later set that figure as the minimum price it will accept.FCC rules prohibit potential bidders such as Google from commenting on their spectrum plans in the run-up to the auction. Bidding is anonymous, but the FCC will release some information about the auctions at its auction Web page.But several wireless industry observers have suggested that Google may not want to win the C block spectrum. Google, by getting the FCC to adopt the open-access rules and by pushing Verizon Wireless and AT&amp;T to&#160;open up their current wireless networks to outside devices and applications, has already accomplished much of what it has wanted, Taylor said.&quot;I think it&#39;s fairly widely believed that [Google] doesn&#39;t really want to be the actual carrier,&quot; Taylor said. &quot;That doesn&#39;t mean they still wouldn&#39;t buy spectrum and then work with somebody else who&#39;s a carrier.&quot;A subcontracting arrangement with a wireless carrier would make sense for Google, she said.Blair Levin, a telecom analyst with Stifel, Nicolaus &amp; Co., also doubts Google will be a major player in the C block bidding. With the U.S. stock markets tanking in recent weeks, Google may not want to spend $10 billion to build a national network, he said, referring to the estimated cost.Before the FCC set the auction rules in July, Google had also inquired about the legality of selling spectrum on a wholesale basis. The FCC ruled that such a plan would be legal.In addition to the current wireless giants AT&amp;T and Verizon Wireless, other companies to watch are the cable television providers, satellite TV providers and handset maker Qualcomm, Taylor said. Qualcomm and cable provider Cox were among the 214 bidders approved by the FCC this month.Look for wireless carriers such as AT&amp;T and Verizon to bid defensively, she said. &quot;If the traditional mobile carriers really are the final winners of most of the spectrum, then nothing interesting happens,&quot; she said. &quot;They don&#39;t want to see some major new entrant coming in.&quot;Falling stock prices on Wall Street may discourage some competing bidders, with the auction coming at &quot;precisely a bad time&quot; for investment in a new nationwide network, Taylor said. But these auctions may be the last chance for a third nationwide broadband network, she added.The 700MHz spectrum band carries wireless broadband signals three to four times farther than some higher spectrum bands, making it perfect for long-range broadband networks. &quot;If you&#39;re going to build a green-field network from scratch, you want to build it at low megahertz like this,&quot; Taylor said. &quot;If anybody was seriously considering launching a fully new competitor ... from scratch, this is the chance. There isn&#39;t going to be another one, probably.&quot;
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In areas where there are not enough lines to transmit electricity, utilities sometimes have to buy from costlier power plants nearby.
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Expect mobile broadband access to be commonplace in the next couple of years. The technologies are here and so is the demand, but spectrum and cost issues remain.
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Plans to lay an undersea fiber-optic cable off eastern Africa could be the beginning of the end of crackling long-distance calls, slow dial-up Internet connections and universities without e-mail.
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In the wired fiberoptic service arena, there are two principal rollout architectures, dealing with whether the line to your house gets replaced with fiberoptic or gets left as copper. Today there was news on both fronts.
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Cisco Systems wants to turn the enterprise data network into an electricity meter.Using open standards, the company wants to get server and storage vendors to collect and share information about their equipment and send it to Cisco routers and switches. The data could include power consumption, operating temperature and more. It&#39;s becoming a critical job, and because the network touches all IT resources across the enterprise, data collection should happen there, according to Paul Marcoux, vice president of green engineering.Marcoux joined Cisco from American Power Conversion only about six weeks ago after Cisco created the position to overlook energy issues across all parts of the company. Networking gear itself makes up a much smaller portion of IT power consumption than do servers or storage, but Cisco plans to go beyond just making its own products more efficient.Power is a growing issue in datacenters as the cost of energy rises and concerns about global climate change increase. Being able to collect and analyze information about power usage is a big part of the battle and becoming more crucial in the age of virtualization, according to Marcoux. Distributing storage and processing cycles without regard for power issues is not just inefficient, it&#39;s dangerous, he said.If virtualization software looks at a process that requires more computing power or storage space, then enlists servers or storage devices that are near to overheating or running out of power, it could send a rack of servers over the edge and shut it down, Marcoux said. For that reason, the virtualization system needs to know the power status of all the resources it may call upon, he said.By the same token, consolidated datacenters typically serve many departments of an enterprise and consume a lot of power, but those groups generally don&#39;t have to pay for their part of the power. In fact, the electricity bill often bypasses even the IT department, going to building management instead, Marcoux said. Collecting data about the power consumed by each device, and eventually by individual transactions, would allow enterprises to bill each department for the power it uses, he said.Software on routers and switches would collect the information and then take actions or forward it on to separate building management, energy management or virtualization control systems, Marcoux said. Given the large amount of energy data to be processed, Cisco may introduce daughtercards for its platforms to provide extra computing power, he said. He hopes the technology will be in place and collecting information in enterprises within three years.Because datacenters contain gear from so many vendors, open standards are the only way to make such a system work, according to Cisco. Fortunately, there already are several available standards, Marcoux said. Having standards already in place will help speed up adoption, Marcoux said.&quot;We&#39;re not trying to reinvent the wheel, we&#39;re just trying now to utilize the wheel,&quot; Marcoux said.Cisco&#39;s proposal would represent a whole new role for networks beyond communications, said Burton Group analyst Dave Passmore. Server vendors might go along with the plan, but Cisco can&#39;t count on smooth sailing, he said. Centralized power regulation would play a role in overall management of the datacenter, an area where Cisco is attempting to make inroads with other initiatives as well.&quot;Who controls virtualization in the data center is going to be the new battleground,&quot; Passmore said.
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A growing chorus of large industrial power users, municipal utilities and consumer groups argue that the price of electricity has not fallen because the new markets for utilities do not work right.
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A coalition of big technology companies wants to bring high-speed Internet access to consumers in a new way: over television airwaves. Key to the project is whether a device scheduled to be delivered to federal labs today lives up to its promise.
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Plans for municipal Wi-Fi in a dozen cities currently in negotiations with EarthLink may be in jeopardy as the company is imposing new demands on how the networks are to be paid for.
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Proposed law could prevent the government from offering broadband access.
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Competition may not fix problems with broadband speed and cost in the United States, because of the high cost of entry into the market, the leader of a technology think tank said Friday.Many policymakers in Washington, D.C., call for competition to cure issues with broadband value and build-out, but they don&#39;t recognize that the cost of building out competing networks may make broadband a natural monopoly or duopoly, said Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).&quot;It&#39;s a mistake for policymakers to assume that if they simply &#39;push the competition lever,&#39; all the problems with broadband policy will be solved,&quot; wrote Atkinson, in an ITIF paper. &quot;The bottom line is that if policymakers want to maximize not only societal welfare but also consumer welfare, they must balance the push for more competition with the need to maintain and create an efficient broadband industry structure.&quot;Atkinson and some other speakers at an ITIF broadband policy forum argued that the United States may need more broadband regulations to achieve higher speeds and lower prices. Atkinson suggested a balance between competition and regulations that would mandate open pipes and create stronger enforcement of consumer protection and antitrust laws.Not everyone agreed that more regulation was appropriate. The suggestion that broadband is a natural monopoly or duopoly &quot;as an economist gives me the willies,&quot; said John Mayo, professor of economics, business and public policy at Georgetown University.A government-supported monopoly in the traditional telephone market didn&#39;t work, Mayo said. He recalled an old Bell Atlantic billboard saying something to the effect of, &quot;We don&#39;t sell you what you think you want; we sell you what we know you need.&quot;Broadband is still a relatively new technology and the broadband business model is still evolving, Mayo said. The industry doesn&#39;t need government regulation while it&#39;s still developing.Other speakers complained that U.S. residents get&#160;lower speeds&#160;for&#160;higher prices&#160;than many residents of Europe and the Far East. But Mayo noted that prices have been falling. &quot;No matter how you measure it ... it&#39;s more affordable today than it&#39;s ever been,&quot; he said.Speakers at the forum noted that broadband policy is becoming an issue in the U.S. presidential campaign. This month, Sen. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, outlined a broadband policy that would include tax incentives for broadband carriers to move into rural and other underserved areas. Clinton also called for public and private partnerships to help roll out broadband and for the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to develop better data about where broadband is available.Several other candidates have talked about broadband as well, including Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani, noted Jonathan Sallet, a partner in the Washington communications firm, the Glover Park Group.But many policymakers in Washington have recently taken a hands-off approach to broadband, thinking &quot;let&#39;s create a neutral platform and just let stuff happen,&quot; added Steven Weber, a professor of political science at the University of California Berkeley. But just letting stuff happen isn&#39;t working to push broadband in many sectors, including health care, he said.&quot;I don&#39;t think that argument is completely adequate to most people,&quot; he said.