[RFI] From Communications Daily re: BPL

[Dave Bernstein]

One doesn't need expertise in economics to point out the flaws in BPL's
economics any more than one needs expertise in calculus to point out the
flaws in 2+2=22; they are equally glaring and egregious. Attempting to
compete with cable and DSL in urban and suburban areas, for example, is
ludicrous; for a latecomer to displace a dominant product with an
undifferentiated product would require hundreds of millions of dollars in
marketing expense alone, ignoring the rollout, deployment, and
still-unscoped RFI mitigation costs. In rural areas, the fiction that BPL is
a "last mile" solution becomes obvious in the need to deploy repeaters,
transformer bypasses, and other pole-mounted equipment to access a sparse
user population; WiMax will have the clear advantage here.

While I disagree, I understand the "lets keep relations with BPL suppliers
collegial so we can work with them to mitigate inteference" strategy. But if
the BPL industry is publicly characterizing the ARRL as having declared war,
then we're pulling our punches for no good reason.

There is evidence that ARRL's position is changing. In his July 1 editorial
"BPL -- a Blind Alley", ARRL CEO Dave K1ZZ said in reference to the Manassas
BPL pilot "It doesn't take an MBA to figure out that operating the system is
costing a lot more than it is producing in revenue from 100 paying customers
as of the time the bid package was released." During an update at the New
England Division Convention held in Boxboro MA earlier this month, Division
Director Tom K1KI spoke of efforts aimed directly at potential BPL
investors. When I asked about arming the membership at large with the
information needed to debunk BPL locally, Tom's explanation for not doing
this was "we're constrained by resources", rather than "that would damage
ARRL's credibility".

I do agree with your point that BPL critique from outside the amateur radio
community is inherently more credible. A video showing the effects of BPL on
public saftety or law enforcement communications would have 100 times the
impact of one showing interference to a vanilla amateur net or to reception
of Radio Netherlands.

See http://www.arrl.org/news/features/2004/07/01/1/ for the full text of
K1ZZ's editorial.

    73,

       Dave, AA6YQ



-----Original Message-----
From: rfi-bounces at contesting.com [mailto:rfi-bounces at contesting.com] On
Behalf Of Alan NV8A (ex. AB2OS)
Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2004 4:42 PM
To: rfi at contesting.com
Subject: Re: [RFI] From Communications Daily re: BPL


But the ARRL doesn't claim to have expertise in economics. If they 
criticized BPL on economic grounds, why should anyone take them seriously?

Now if the ARRL has members with expertise in economics, that's another 
matter: such members could attack it on economic grounds, and perhaps 
the ARRL could even circulate their analyses -- but that still wouldn't 
carry as much weight as an economic analysis carried out by somebody 
with no connections to ARRL or to ham radio.

Alan NV8A


On 08/31/04 04:07 pm Dave Bernstein put fingers to keyboard and launched 
the following message into cyberspace:

> The PLCA doesn't give the ARRL much credit for focusing on the 
> BPL-generated RFI issues and staying quiet about BPL's poor economics. 
> "This has become like an unmitigated war that ARRL has declared on 
> this industry" doesn't sound very collegial...
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