The first commercial, non-pilot deployment of broadband over power lines (BPL) in the United States was plugged in on Wednesday in the city of Manassas, Virginia.

The company behind the technology is Chantilly, Virginia-based Communication Technologies (ComTek), a 15-year-old, 900-employee privately held company.

BPL uses the electricity grid and wiring in individual homes as an access route to the Internet to take advantage of broadband services such as data, video, and voice delivery. It competes with telephone companies and cable TV services as access technologies to the Internet.

ComTek said it has already signed up 700 of the roughly 12,500 households in Manassas that are now within the scope of its BPL network and is processing another 500 households that have requested the service. The service is also available to 2,500 businesses in the city.

“This is not an experiment,” said ComTek CEO Joseph Fergus. “It’s a full-scale implementation of BPL. It has never been done anywhere in the U.S. This is a technology that will be deployed in scores of communities in the next two years.”

Mr. Fergus said that ComTek is currently in negotiations to deliver similar services to nine other investor-owned and municipally owned utilities, and other commercial entities.

ComTek’s design of the Manassas network employs the power lines in and near the home as a “last mile” transport technology. Communications will be bridged to the municipal fiber-optic network using specialized electronic converters. The exact design of any BPL network will depend on what the city or community has available.

In some cases the company may use broadband wireless as the long-haul technology.

Revenue Sharing

The company charges $38.95 a month for the service and shares revenue with the city, which owns the municipal power and fiber-optic networks.

“We have accomplished something here that will be a model for other cities and towns across the United States,” said Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA). “Congress is looking closely at ways to improve broadband access in rural and other non-urban settings, and that is why I am so encouraged by the Manassas success with broadband over power lines.”

By installing intelligent electronics on the network, the BPL deployment will extend the reach and capabilities of the Manassas utility. The utility will be able to better monitor and respond to outages at both the transformer and customer levels, according to ComTek. The utility will also have better monitoring and control of services such as traffic signals and video surveillance systems.

The network allows for automatic meter reading. The city is also exploring applications such as automatic distribution switching, which would restore power more quickly to the grid after outages.

Slow Evolution

BPL has had a slow evolution into the market.

“We’ve heard this talked about for 20 years,” said Eamon Hoey, a telecommunications analyst with Hoey Associates. “Most of the attempts to make it a commercial success have fizzled because they were driven by utility engineers rather than the market. Utilities generally come out of monopoly backgrounds, and it’s tough for them to make the necessary switch to a customer-driven approach.”

Last week the BPL market got an unexpected shot in the arm from Panasonic/Matsushita, which announced an eight-fold upgrade in the existing speed of PBL communications with the unveiling of a module that operates at 170 megabits per second over power lines (see Panasonic Speeds BPL).

And three months ago, the industry took an infusion of cash from Google, Goldman Sachs, and Hearst, which jointly announced they were investing about $100 million in Current Communications, a BPL systems startup based in Germantown, Maryland.