BRUSSELS, Belgium - European regulators today approved a British-Canadian venture to provide Internet access in Europe and Asia at almost 10 times the normal rate using existing power lines.
A statement from the European Commission concluded that the venture between British power company Norweb and Canadian telecommunications firm Nortel complied with the EU's fair competition rules.
Norweb and Nortel in October unveiled the service, which enables high-speed access over electrical lines. The big breakthrough is development of a system that allows the data to survive the trip over extremely noisy lines uncorrupted. With permanent access to data that travels directly from the power mains into homes at speeds as high as 1 Mbps, the system heralds the first rivalry between electricity and telcos.
The technology faces one big obstacle before it can be widely adopted. Since the data cannot survive the trip through a transformer, it requires an external route around the power units. Providing bridges around each and every transformer will require a significant investment from power companies. That, in turn, is seen as a more realistic financial proposition in Britain, where one transformer serves 200 to 300 customers, than in the United States, where's there's just a dozen customers to a transformer.
