Technology June 2006 Atlantic Monthly

Broadband sent over power lines offers Internet access everywhere in your house—and could also offer the country a way to save energy

E-mail Out of Every Plug

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The longer I have watched the technology world develop, the more cautious I’ve become about predicting what will happen next. Products that seem destined to catch on often fade and vanish; companies, ideas, and even business leaders with the odds stacked against them somehow prevail. In the early 1980s, Xerox introduced its Star computer, which had most of the intuitive, easy-to-use features that Apple offered a few years later with huge fanfare in the Macintosh (and that Microsoft eventually added to Windows). Now the Star is long forgotten, while Apple and Windows live on. Ten years ago, as the much-loved WordPerfect was being eclipsed by Microsoft Word, and Lotus 1-2-3 by Microsoft Excel, it would have seemed foolish to bet that Adobe, a Microsoft competitor with nothing like its resources, could establish its PDF (Portable Document Format) as a standard. Now PDF technology is ubiquitous, thanks to luck and to Adobe’s decision to distribute Reader software free, as part of its “Adobe everywhere” strategy.

Technologies developed originally for one purpose often prove most important in other, unforeseen ways. The most famous example is the Internet itself. Its novel system of communication—messages are broken into many tiny “packets” of information, each of which follows the least-congested path toward the destination the instant it is sent—was intended to let the network survive damage after a nuclear attack. So far its real importance has been allowing the worldwide Internet to expand constantly with amazingly few bottlenecks.

My nominee for the innovation now mutating into the most interesting new forms is a technology called Broadband over Power Lines, or BPL (about which I first wrote in The New York Times two years ago). For years it has been touted as the answer to a problem that, it now appears, will be solved in other ways. But meanwhile it is providing a useful new service for consumers. It could even play a part in addressing environmental and national-security concerns.

The concept behind BPL is that the same wires that carry electric power to homes and offices—at higher voltage across trunk lines and at (usually) 110 volts inside a building—can also carry high-speed Internet traffic. Somehow this seems harder to believe than the fact that a single wire from a cable-TV company can handle e-mail and Web signals while also bringing in TV programs. When you look at a Boeing 747 on the ground, you don’t think it can fly; when you stare at an electric outlet, you don’t think e-mail can come out of it. But it can. The reason, to oversimplify, is that a wire can simultaneously carry signals at a variety of frequencies, from sixty cycles per second for electric power to 3 million cycles per second and up for Internet data.

The initial promise of BPL was to help solve the Internet’s “last mile” problem, which until recently seemed a major concern. The last mile is the distance between main data lines and individual homes, businesses, and schools. It was seen as a social problem, because extending coverage to remote areas was costly and slow. Cable-TV companies have had an advantage over phone companies in solving last-mile issues, since cable for TV, which can carry Internet traffic, already reaches many homes, far more than are close enough to a phone switching station to receive DSL service. But since virtually all homes and other buildings are already connected to the electric grid, BPL could in theory offer near-universal broadband coverage at very low capital cost. Toward this end the Federal Communications Commission has issued rulings and standards to promote the spread of BPL.

This way of delivering Internet service, known in the trade as “Access BPL,” will probably be one part of America’s eventual broadband system. But it is rarely discussed anymore as a cure-all. In part this is because it is being complemented, leapfrogged, and in some cases outflanked by other technologies, including new forms of wireless strong and fast enough to eliminate last-mile problems by broadcasting from transmission towers to surrounding neighborhoods.

Access BPL has also been hindered by ferocious opposition from the Amateur Radio Relay League, or ARRL, which represents ham-radio operators. Whenever electric current is sent through an unshielded wire, the wire becomes an antenna that broadcasts radio waves. The ARRL points out on its Web site and in letter-writing campaigns that the signals resulting from BPL transmission can create static on the frequencies used by hams (as normal electric transmissions do not). The more electric lines are used to transmit data, the group warns, the harder it will be for hams to do work that matters—such as coordinating rescues, as they did after Hurricane Katrina. Some BPL companies have “notched” their transmissions to avoid frequencies that would interfere with hams, but this makes BPL slightly less efficient. For these and other reasons, “there’s going to be no single solution for covering the last mile,” says Theodore Schell, a former Sprint executive who is now involved in BPL startups. “Power lines will be one very effective tool in a toolbox of wireless, fiber, and other forms of last-mile transport.”

What, then, is the point of discussing BPL? For the average user, BPL offers about the only way to work around one of the rarefied discontents of the modern computer age: not having broadband access wherever you want it.

Sure, you have a high-speed Internet connection coming to your house, via cable, DSL, or some other means. And you feed that connection into a router, so that you can link other computers to the Internet directly with Ethernet cable or via a home WiFi network. If you’re in a modern dorm or office building, Ethernet cable has already been snaked through the walls to provide access points in every room. But most houses aren’t pre-wired, and most large or multi- story houses have dead spots that the WiFi coverage can’t reach.

This is where another form of the technology, “In-House BPL,” comes in. It allows you to create an Internet access point, or another WiFi hotspot, wherever you have an electric outlet. Considering the difference it makes, it is simple to set up.

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James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic.