TJ has been digging around again and he found another article written by Dinesh Kumar. Now USUALLY, as TJ points out, when Dinesh writes, it seems the stock goes up---who knows this time..not the same upbeat stuff...but here is the article that TJ found, copied from the Yahoo board.
Analysts See DirecTV BPL Tests as Backup for DSL
617 words
22 May 2007
Warren's Consumer Electronics Daily
Volume 7; Issue 98
English
(c) Copyright 2007 Warren Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
DirecTV's reported plans to test BPL for broadband could be a backup in case its alliances with telcos for reselling DSL unravel, analysts said. Without elaborating, DirecTV CEO Chase Carey last week told the Reuters Global Technology Summit that his company wants to test BPL in a "top 50 city where you're covering at least 1/2 the city." Liberty Media, which is to take control of DirecTV this year, is a shareholder in the largest BPL provider, Current Communications.
DirecTV is "not going to discuss any possible plans in detail," a spokesman told us. "We are taking a greenfield approach to broadband and are looking at any and all possible opportunities... Broadband over power lines has always been on a long list of potential opportunities." Current didn't comment; the news has stirred considerable BPL industry interest. A big player like DirecTV provides a "perfect marketing channel for BPL to the extent that they are going to offer it as a package," said Brett Kilbourne, regulatory dir. of the United Power Line Council.
With scant details of DirecTV's BPL test available, talk in the BPL industry was of whether the satellite provider is looking at in-home BPL or access BPL to provide broadband service. Telkonet, the leading in-home provider, already has a "joint program" with DirecTV focused on the multidwelling unit market, Exec. Vp. Albert Diehl told us. The alliance targets MDUs wired with old coaxial cable over which DirecTV can't provide data and VoIP, he said. So it uses the Telkonet power line backbone to provide voice and data offerings bundled with its video, he added.
As an access technology, BPL basically will replace the phone line as an upstream channel, said an engineering official at a BPL company. Satellite and DSL providers have deals to offer high-speed services, he said, but with telcos developing their own video offerings DirecTV seems to have "sensed that having a backup plan to DSL would be a good idea." DirecTV, which has looked at Wi-Fi and WiMAX, seems concerned "they might run into bandwidth issues on the wireless side," said Kilbourne. BPL home networking technology for HDTV provides more bandwidth, he said; the concern with wireless is that, unlike BPL, it could get congested over time.
DirecTV resells DSL through alliances with some large telcos; having BPL as a backup makes sense should those deals not work out, said Vince Vittore of the Yankee Group. There's a question about what AT&T will do with the resale agreements of BellSouth, which it recently acquired, he said: "BPL can be viewed to some extent as a strategic backup plan just in case they no longer have the option of reselling DSL or the business relationship doesn't work out to their liking." The advantages for BPL are that it can be provided anywhere and is "relatively quick," he said. But it's a "fairly noisy" technology so it can be difficult to run voice signals over it, he said.
DirecTV's announcement was surprising because no commercial BPL deployments can be called successful, said Rick Nicholson of Energy Insights. But there's logic to DirecTV's plans, because satellite companies' ability to compete with cable and telcos is "relatively limited" unless they have a 3rd channel into the home, he added: "I can see from a strategic point of view why they would be considering BPL, but the timing of it surprised me in that I would have expected them to wait a little longer for something that they could point to as a success." -- Dinesh Kumar, Heather Forsgren Weaver
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