Powerline: The future of broadband?

Imagine a world where virtually unlimited bandwidth was as close as the nearest electric wall socket.

A Dallas-based company called Media Fusion says this dream may be less than a year away. The company's technology is still in the laboratory stage, but significant questions remain about its viability in real markets. Yet if it does work, the technology could radically reshape a communications landscape now dominated by telephone and cable companies.

Media Fusion is developing technology it says can send data, voice, or video signals over electric power lines, at speeds vastly exceeding current cable modem or telephone systems. Where cable or telephone companies talk in terms of megabits per second, Media Fusion talks of the possibility of transmitting exobits--that's a "1" with eighteen zeros after it--per second though power lines.

In the abstract, the idea isn't new. Utilities and telecommunications companies like Nortel have sought a way to transmit data efficiently through power lines for years. These efforts have consistently run into technical stumbling blocks, however.

Media Fusion has yet to take their technology live on a power grid. But the technology's apparent potential--virtually unlimited bandwidth with a vast geographic reach--has created a growing buzz among utilities and in government circles. Top congressional officials say they will even seek government funding for the project if the private sector doesn't come through.

This support is predicated on the success of the system's first live tests, which the company says will begin in just a few months.

In discussions with financial backers and potential political supporters, the company has said individual consumers could get network connections of 2.5 gigabits per second--an estimate the company calls highly conservative.

That's not quite an exobit. But even at that speed, one could have high-quality, real-time videoconferencing or easily watch a movie downloaded from the Net.

"This would be a massive empowerment of communications systems," says CEO Ed Blair, a Dallas entrepreneur who helped researcher William "Luke" Stewart start Media Fusion two years ago. "My view is that this will start whole new industries."

This vision has attracted its share of skeptics, who say the promise of nearly unlimited bandwidth is little more than fantasy.

"Every disruptive technology at its inception has been seen as absurd," says Bob Dillon, a co-founder of Enikia, a company that does powerline home networking technology. "But there are technologies that have proven to be absurd, and my layman's perception of this is that it seems absurd."

Yet one utility company has signed on to test the system with a trial audience of 1,500 people by the end of 1999. At least six other electric utilities have signed confidentiality agreements, and a European venture group has agreed to purchase a technology license for $65 million, the company says.

Financial backers will release stages of funding over the course of the next year, as Media Fusion slowly takes its system out of simulation and proves its viability on a genuine power grid. "It's like the Empire State Building," Blair says. "You can build a model, but it's only a model until you build the building itself."

The idea of communicating over power lines isn't new. Electric lines, aside from powering toasters and microwave ovens, can also transmit electromagnetic pulses used for voice signals. Yet the world's power transmission grids weren't built for traditional communications. The amount of interference created by electric power, combined with the difficulty of sending data through transformers, has stalled most powerline research.

A few companies, led by Nortel and a handful of European utilities, have nevertheless experimented with the idea. After several years of research, trials, and setbacks, the firms have succeeded in transmitting data signals over power lines at about 1 mbps--a respectable rate, but short of what a cable or a fast DSL connection can do.

"At this point we're not actively out promoting it," said Nortel senior manager Jim McClanahan, one of the leaders of the power line project.