...they can. Often they piggy-back on their existing infrastructure–rural telephone and power distribution networks, highway rights-of-way and utility mains.

Contracts are flying, but cell phone providers, cable companies and telecoms whine that municipalities shouldn’t spend tax revenue to compete. Lawyers and lobbyists are pushing legislative proposals to severely restrain public construction and operation of fiber, BPL or wireless infrastructure. Blocking legislation is under consideration in Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia, according to Washington, D.C.-based American Public Power Association. Lawsuits are also being used in attempts to derail funding.

Despite legal challenges, the momentum is growing. Engineers and contractors are benefitting and getting creative at threading it all together.

Hard Going in Big Easy

In New Orleans, officials are fitting an FTTP project within an ongoing, $600-million overhaul of the city’s sewer collection system. Program manager Montgomery Watson Harza, Broomfield, Colo., is ready to start local Boh Bros Construction Co. LLC on the first phase of a $5.5-million, 26,500-ft sewer main replacement project in the central business district. The job includes laying conduit for fiber-optic cable to businesses at the same time.

The city sewerage and water board will lease the conduit, which will offer broadband service providers dedicated runs to about 80 key buildings. It hopes to gain not only ultra-high-speed connectivity for the heart of its business district, but also a revenue stream where only sewage ran before.

The last hitch in project negotiations has not been between the contractor and client, but between the city council and the sewerage and water board over dividing anticipated revenue.

The installation technique is patented by Renaissance Integrated Solutions, Armonk, N.Y. "It’s a take-off on pipe-bursting technology, which we are using all over the country for rehabbing sanitary sewers," says Marty Dorward, head of MWH’s project in New Orleans. This first full-scale implementation will use a pipe-bursting head to shatter the 50 to 100-year-old, 8-in. vitrified clay mains and pull in a 10-in. replacement line ringed with eight 11�4-in. high-density polyethelyne conduits on the outside. Four conduits are reserved for a municipal loop and the rest are for laterals. A junction box beside each sewer manhole gives access to the conduit, keeping the parallel systems segregated. Boxes at the property lines by each lateral are for connections to the buildings.

Dorward says MWH expects to get notice to proceed in April and finish in October. Bids for the second, 18,000-ft phase are to be let in May, but work on the rest of the city’s 7-million-ft system will go on much longer. "They’re studying the entire system," Dorward says. "I think it’s boiling down to rehabbing about 30%. If this works in the central business district there is potential for expanding it."
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Piggy-Back Renaissance pipe-bursting system marries conduit to replacement lines. (Photos courtesy of Renaissance Integrated Solutions)

Earlier approaches that used robots to run and attach fiber inside sewer lines have failed to catch on. "Part of the problem has been to get the sewer utilities to buy in," says Dorward. The co-location of the services, "makes utility operators nervous," he says. Also, in pilots, pipe conditions were often worse than anticipated and difficulties with user-side connections left most trials stuck in the demonstration phase.

If the New Orleans installation succeeds a similar project in San Francisco may follow. Several members of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors are pushing to include broadband cable in a planned, city-wide water and sewer upgrade. But John Brittona, spokesman for local incumbent SBC, argues that fiber is not needed because there is "already unused fiber capacity." Nevertheless, the city’s budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 includes $300,000 for a feasibility study. The Public Utilities Commission is expected on March 8 to call for proposals. The study should be finished by year’s end.

One local government advantage over privately funded FTTH is that governments can finance with community development grants and long-term financing and not worry about satisfying investors by showing profits in three to five years. Many of the BPL initiatives being piloted by rural and municipal power utilities are taking advantage of that. Like sewer and water utilities, they are trying to leverage existing infrastructure to create a new revenue stream.

Manassas, Va., is often cited as a BPL success story. It has the country’s only commercial BPL deployment. John Hewa, utilities director for the Manassas Electric Dept., says the city, with a population of 36,000 people and 15,000 electric customers, issued a long-term franchise for BPL Internet services to Communication Technologies Inc., Chantilly, Va. The city installed and maintains the BPL equipment and backhaul with its own forces. COMTek supplies the equipment and receives part of the revenue.

Currently in the middle of a year-long deployment, the Manassas system has 300 customers. "We hope at some point for 10 to 15% market share," or about 1,500 customers, Hewa says. "Deployment will be complete in a couple of months."

COMTek is bearing about 75% of the cost, says Hewa. The city handles marketing, billing, customer support, service and content. He calls the investment worthwhile. One side advantage of BPL is that it enables highly sophisticated system control. "It will be the back plane for any user services," Hewa says.

Others, however, aren’t sold. Tom Asp, a partner with CPA and technology consultant Virchow, Krause & Co., Chicago, dismisses the example of Manassas, pointing out "they have less than 500 customers after two years," and a backlog of more than 2,000 customers. He is also unimpressed with BPL technology. "It hasn’t changed much in the past 30 years," he says. "The physics are the same, but with different frequency. The issues are the same as 20 years ago," costly hardware and equipment to maintain signal strength. "You’re better off looking at a wireless system because BPL is still in pilot," he says. "There are a handful of vendors, no standards and real questions about interference."

Corning Optical’s Whitman also doesn’t see BPL as a major contender. "The capability is, at best, on par with DSL and cable modems," he says. "Because it’s a little behind, the technology is not going to catch up. It kind of missed its calling. If you could pay for it by doing meter readings and system controls it might still develop, but it won’t become a serious challenge in the broadband service provider market."

It is the fiber networks that will dominate and most of what people will do with all the data transmission capacity has yet to be imagined, he predicts. Officials in Fontana, Calif., for instance, have one novel idea. The $100-million FTTC network they hope to start building this fall will not be leased to any one vendor. Rather, it will work as an "open-access system," delivering the signals of competing vendors so Fontana residents can choose between them.