Broadband over Power Line (BPL) provider, IBEC, going out of business.

IBEC, a BPL provider in Alabama, is going out of business. It is claiming that it never recovered from the hurricane, but I can't help but wonder if it is also due to the basic flaws in the BPL business case. Their announcement is on their website: http://www.ibec.net.

73s de Tim KD7JZ

 

Hi Tim:

This is my first reply on qrz.com. Joined over New Years. I saw this on dslreports.com eariler today at work. I work for a major ISP as a support tech. The ISP I work for has bell system legacy. Anyway, if you want to get a good laugh, just mention BPL to some of our engineers! I would agree that it has to be basic flaws in the business model and performance. It would be interesting to get honest customer reviews of this system. I predicted the marketplace would do BPL in years ago and alot of IT folks scoffed at me. Those that scoffed knew little about how things really worked. Myself I work in the IT/telecom industry and have for 30 years and a ham for 33 years. For all of the things one would have to do to the power lines to clean them up for a mere 2-4 meg of bandwidth(on a good day) fiber optic cable is a much better investment We use LOTS of fiber where I work and more networks are upgrading to fiber every day. One thing that annoyed me during the BPL hype a few years ago was the BPL cheerleaders and some of the BPL companies snubbing the hams on any technical issues. What these people forgot is there are many hams who are professionally involved with IT, telecom, RF, electronics, etc. In fact, some of the most knowledgeable customer contacts I have are fellow hams. And there many hams who work for the same ISP that I work for as well.
73's
Bob.