Tasmanian power company Aurora Energy has completed an initial trial of broadband over electricity lines, achieving speeds of between 10 and 30Mbps.

Broadband over power lines would completely bypass existing broadband delivery methods, including Telstra's DSL network, with its attached monthly line rentals.

Aurora is planning a larger pilot of broadband over power lines in mid 2005 but it will be restricted to a limited number of customers while they better understand its potential.

Whilst the technology was trialed in Tasmania, there's no reason it can't be made available throughout Australia, according to Aurora. The company told Whirlpool that other utilities are looking into broadband over power lines and are likely to make some announcements over the next few months.

Piero Peroni, the Business Development Manager for Aurora is optimistic on how BPL will compare to current ADSL services. "It is early days but we expect to deliver a very competitive service, at higher bit rates to ADSL, fully symmetric [same upload speed as download], and available from every room in the house."

To access the broadband a PLC modem can be plugged into any power point in the home to receive the broadband signal.

Links:

• U.S. gives blessing to powerline broadband  (Whirlpool, 12 Apr 2003)
• Broadband over powerlines for NSW  (Whirlpool, 19 Aug 2002)
• Super-speed network to topple Telstra's dominance  (Whirlpool, 6 Aug 2002)
• Broadband data over powerlines comes closer  (Whirlpool, 20 Mar 2002)
• Power line broadband Internet access the solution?  (Whirlpool, 26 Apr 2001)