Thanks, Jay. My prepared remarks will be on both the CITI Web site and the ARRL BPL Web site. As for the text of odv 11984, I'd be more comfortable if you'd let me see what you've excerpted before distributing it. The reason is that I don't want you to be accused of misrepresenting the workshop by taking anything out of context. Dave -----Original Message----- From: Bellows, John (Dir, Dakota) Sent: Monday, March 21, 2005 2:59 PM To: arrl-odv Subject: [arrl-odv:11989] Re: CITI workshop on Alternative Broadband Platforms Dave: Thanks for the highly informative report on the CITI Workshop. The Clearwire project referred to by Mr. Salemme will be (future tense) located in St. Cloud, MN, a city of 50,000 in central MN. Your prepared remarks are an excellent overview of Amateur concerns as to the reality of BPL interference. I would like to use portions of your remarks and the text in odv 11984. Since odv's are generally treated as Board Confidential, I wanted to ask first. Any use would not include asides or observations about individuals. 73, Jay, KØQB -----Original Message----- From: Sumner, Dave, K1ZZ [mailto:dsumner@arrl.org] Sent: Monday, March 21, 2005 9:50 AM To: arrl-odv Subject: [arrl-odv:11984] CITI workshop on Alternative Broadband Platforms Last Friday, March 18, the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information (CITI) at Columbia University held a workshop on "Alternative Broadband Platforms: Can They Compete With Fiber Optics? Where?" The Director of CITI is Eli Noam, KE2PN. CITI held its first workshop on BPL (then called PLC) in February 2002 and has held several more since then. Last Friday's was the first in which we were invited to participate. The workshop was not limited to BPL, but the morning session was devoted to the topic. There were about 70 people in attendance. I don't know how to characterize the participants; I think most of them were involved in some aspect of broadband telecommunications, although there were also a number of academics and students. The first speaker was Walter Adams, Vice President of ComTek, the company that took over the Manassas franchise after the first franchisee failed to deliver (which he didn't mention). ComTek is a telecommunications company, not a BPL company, and Adams was careful to stress that in their view BPL is like a golf club that you'd like to have in your bag but wouldn't use for every shot. They also do wireless, and sometimes wireless is a better solution. He acknowledged that the power grid was not invented to deliver broadband signals and that BPL was not the answer for rural areas. He talked quite a bit about the internal benefits of BPL to the utility rather than of the retail broadband business. Manassas is a 10-square-mile area where 82% of the electric lines are underground. There are 15,000 electric utility customers with an average of 7.5 per transformer. He said that as of now about 7,000 customers have access to BPL, up from 2,000 in December, and they expected nearly everyone to have access by the end of April. The basic service is 500 kbps in both directions for $28.95 per month. Adams said they now have 300 subscribers and are adding 100 per month with about a 10% "take rate" after 3 or 4 months. The next speaker was Joe Cufari, Vice President of Business Development, Current Communications Group. They're working with Cinergy in Cincinnati, and Cufari claimed they had "several thousand customers on line" there. He talked quite a bit about customer service and the need to deliver a good "gaming experience," especially for violent interactive video games that require short latency. He also talked about the internal benefits of BPL for utilities. The third speaker was Brett Kilbourne, Director of Regulatory Services for UPLC. Brett was there to address internal use of BPL by utilities and BPL standards, so the first part of his talk covered much the same ground as the previous speakers. He talked a little about various standards bodies, including ARRL involvement through IEEE, and industry initiatives to develop standards (which brought mind the old saying, "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from"). A question later in the session revealed that there are no industry standards for the internal utility applications. I was next. My entire focus was on radio interference and what it meant for the business case for BPL. In his introductory remarks Eli Noam had said that you could view the workshop as addressing the question, "Do you feed your old mule vitamins or do you get a new truck?" So, I began by saying that I was there to talk about the byproduct of feeding the mule. The text I prepared is attached. I didn't read it precisely as written, but I covered the same ground and showed a 30-second video prepared by Gary Pearce, KN4AQ, at my request showing the interference in Briarcliff Manor. I also distributed an updated version of our BPL leave-behind and a copy of my October 2002 QST editorial. The final speaker on the panel was Rahul Tongia, Ph.D., of Carnegie Mellon University. It was a special pleasure for me to meet Dr. Tongia, as I have quoted him often and have referred to his August 2003 paper, "Promises and False Promises of PowerLine Carrier (PLC) Broadband Communications - A Techno-Economic Analysis." He noted that this group had been talking about PLC/BPL for three years, and that BPL didn't have much traction in terms of actual subscribers after all that time. He pointed out that BPL was a shared medium with insufficient bandwidth to deliver video, and questioned whether BPL could ever deliver enough bandwidth for the market since it was inherently a noisy, lossy medium (he said BPL systems had losses of between 10 and 40 dB per km). The present focus of his BPL research is on "smart metering" and other internal utility applications for which less bandwidth is necessary (i.e. it could be done at LF without impacting HF). I fielded two questions from the audience. One was about whether we had any active interference complaints, which gave me the opportunity to say that we had just filed complaints earlier in the week against the Irving, TX and Briarcliff Manor, NY systems. The second was about Corridor Systems, which uses the power line as a travelling wave transmission line; I said that did not raise the same interference concerns as did what the FCC defines as "Access BPL." Commenting on the presentations, Prof. Christian Hogendorn of Wesleyan University questioned the wisdom of using BPL for internal applications since if the power line goes down you've lost your communication -- at precisely the time you need it the most. He noted that one advantage of BPL was that the bandwidth was symmetric -- i.e. it was the same in both directions -- but he didn't see how BPL's latency would be lower than other media and "latency will be a huge issue" not just for gaming but also for VoIP. Just before the lunch break, Hon. Thomas Dunleavy, Commissioner, NY Public Service Commission spoke about NARUC's BPL Task Force and Report which was released in February. He said the basic theme was that "Traditional regulation should not be applied to this nascent technology." However, he also said that he doesn't think "BPL is a telecommunications play" right now. The luncheon speaker was Alan Scrime, Chief, Policy & Rules Division, of the FCC's Office of Engineering & Technology. He talked mostly about wireless broadband and what the FCC had done recently to facilitate it. Of interest to me was that when he hooked up his laptop to the projector, one of the icons on his desktop read something like "ImlayLetter_briarcliff2.doc." The afternoon session did not have to do with BPL, but it was interesting to hear about wireless alternatives to fiber. GigaBeam Corp. uses 70/80/90 GHz for "WiFiber" point-to-point links of up to one mile under FCC Part 101; Terabeam Wireless uses "Free-Space Optics" for paths of up to one km. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, but both claimed 99.999% reliability. The principal applications are to connect between tall buildings when running fiber would be prohibitively costly. Another afternoon presenter was R. Gerard Salemme, EVP and Director, Clearwire. You don't hear much about Clearwire because it is privately held by Craig McCaw and therefore, unlike companies like Ambient, they don't need to con people into buying their stock. Clearwire is using licensed wireless broadband in the 2.5-2.7 GHz range to deliver a consumer service roughly equivalent to DSL and cable, but with the advantage that it is nomadic - that is, you can move around with it. Jacksonville is the first market they entered; he said they are in three other US markets in Texas and Minnesota. Salemme (who I remember was on the staff, in an earlier life, either of the House Telecomms Subcommittee or of Congressman Ed Markey) described Clearwire as a "WiMax precursor." They sell the service out of shopping mall kiosks. He said their system is "plug and play" and that about the only calls they get about installation are from customers who can't figure out how to disable their old dial-up connection. The final presenter was Prof. Heather Hudson of the University of San Francisco, who talked about telecom availability in rural/developing countries. Along the way she noted that BPL didn't seem like a good choice for developing countries since their power grids are seldom reliable. Summing up the day was Prof. A. Michael Noll of the University of Southern California, who said nothing could compete with fiber's capacity but that he would be in his grave before we saw fiber to every home. As for BPL, he said the real use was the internal niche market and that it didn't compete with anything to the home. Responding to his questions as to what we were likely to have 10 years from now, the majority of workshop participants said we would have fiber "close" to the home but that the last link in most cases would be by coaxial cable. They also liked wireless because of mobility and portability. When he asked who would invest in BPL, only two or three hands went up. (It bothered me a bit that there were even that many until I realized there were at least that many people in the room who were already invested in BPL.) In short, it was an interesting and I believe a productive day although I don't think Brett Kilbourne likes me any better now than he did before. Dave Sumner, K1ZZ <<CITI Sumner.doc>>