What do you think?
Electric plug is new gateway to Internet
By Neil Winton, Science and Technology Correspondent
LONDON - Now you can surf the net by plugging into the humble electricity power point.
Analysts said if the product was cheap and effective, consumers would buy it.
Northern Telecom (Nortel) of Canada and Britain's Norweb Communications unveiled on Wednesday what they
called a technology breakthrough" - using electricity plugs in homes and the power delivery network to channel
multimedia services.
Already people can use telephone lines and cable networks to access the world-wide network of computers. Soon
they will be able to receive signals bounced off satellites, or combinations of the above.
Analysts said on Wednesday that multimedia users of the future won't care how they tune into information.
They will only ask whether the system works, how much it costs and do they really need services like electronic
shopping, banking, mail and instant movies.
Nortel and Norweb believe that all the answers for their breakthrough are affirmative. But they concede that
technical problems mean voice transmission is unlikely anytime soon.
As one of the first practical low-cost answers to the problem of high-speed access to the Internet, this new
technology will unleash the next wave of net growth," Peter Dudley, vice president of Nortel told a press
conference.
The technology allows data to be transmitted over electricity power connections at more than 10 times the speed
of the most powerful Internet modems used today, the companies said.
It threatens to trump the upcoming Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), technology being developed by
most of the world's biggest telephone companies. ADSL allows high-band width to be offered over regular
copper wire.
Using ADSL technology you can blast to the Internet at blinding speeds," U.S. ADSL modem maker Hayes
Microcomputer Products said in a recent publicity handout.
But analysts said Nortel's technology had some advantages over ADSL. It had more capacity for two-way traffic,
the interactivity needed for electronic commerce. It also promised to be cheaper because the basis of the network,
electricity connections, had already been laid.
And with all this competition, prices were likely to dive.
This is going to make telephone operators and cable TV companies look closely at how they price their offerings.
Cable networks aren't ubiquitous and it's not clear whether ADSL will be either. So this does have the major
benefit of relative ease for the potential users to connect," said Ade Ajibulu, senior consultant at technology
experts Analysis.
David Tarde, telephone industry analyst at Dataquest, said consumers would not be spooked by the idea of
communications emanating from the power supply.
End users don't really care what's at the back of the box, provided they get the best, that it works. Cost will be
paramount at the end of the day," Tarde said.
With all the new entrants into the world of multimedia, business would have to boom to allow profits to be made.
Ajibulu is confident there will be room for everybody.
I'm an optimist. The market is growing very quickly and every Internet user is waiting for higher capacity. It has
consistently exceeded people's expectations of growth," he said.
The Canadian telecoms equipment maker and Norweb, part of United Utilities, said the development allowed them
to carry data traffic between local power substations and homes, effectively turning electricity supply into a
communications network. Each substation was then linked by fiber-optic circuits to a central switch and from
there into the world-wide computer network. |
