Generally speaking, broadband over power line (BPL) deployments have been few and far between. But that’s not stopping Princeton, Illinois. The municipally owned electric utility in Princeton is about to complete its launch of BPL. Princeton began rolling it out in 2006 and expects to complete its rollout by the end of March. Officials from the utility say the BPL network offers “speeds similar to that of DSL service but slower than advertised data transfer rates for broadband service through cable companies.” Princeton charges $24.99/month for the service and has “about 100 customers.” Read more about the Princeton deployment in this Princeton Journal post.
BPL certainly doesn’t seem to be catching fire in the U.S. At this point, it’s hard to imagine BPL being a serious competitive technology to DSL, cable modem, and wireless. Stranger things have happened I guess, but there doesn’t seem to be the mass and scale of deployments for BPL necessary to make it a viable technology going forward. There does seem to be more promise for BPL as an in building/premise distribution network.
