(IDG) -- Sleepy Herrenberg, a picturesque village of 29,000 just outside Stuttgart in southern Germany, doesn't seem like an Internet frontier town. Yet amid the cobblestone streets and medieval churches, a handful of pioneering consumers is involved in a groundbreaking experiment that enables them to surf the Web using their homes' existing electrical wiring. Power lines connect customers at 1 Mbps, prompting the utility behind the project, Energie Baden-Wurttemberg, to promise no dial-ups, no hefty phone bills and no World Wide Wait.

By late September, the utility had rolled out Net access to 40 customers in Herrenberg and nearby Karlsruhe, using technology developed by Nor.Web DPL, a joint venture between Canada's Nortel Networks and United Utilities, a U.K. power company. Energie Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany's fourth-largest utility, plans to expand tests to 200 consumers next year before offering the service systemwide. The company has yet to decide what it will charge for the service.

MORE COMPUTING INTELLIGENCE

IDG.net home page

Industry Standard home page

Industry Standard email newsletters

Industry Standard daily Media Grok

Industry Standard financial news

Industry Standard e-commerce stories

Computerworld "Emmerce"

Fusion financial report
Free registration required to access this site

InfoWorld Internet commerce section

Reviews & in-depth info at IDG.net

IDG.net's personal news page

Questions about computers? Let IDG.net's editors help you

Search IDG.net in 12 languages

Subscribe to IDG.net's free daily newsletter for computer industry cognoscenti

News Radio

Fusion audio primers

Computerworld Minute

Energie's pilot project is the first of its kind in Germany, and the latest in a string of experiments by U.K. and European utilities that are working with Nor.Web to test high-speed residential Internet access over power lines.

"The technology is of great strategic importance because power lines extend to every home and better, even, into every room," says Jens Vesper, a telecommunications expert with Eutelis Consulting in Ratingen, Germany. "If utilities managed to make their networks usable [for data transmission], they would have immediate access to all the users out there," he says.

Using technology developed by United Utilities in 1995, Energie transmits digital data to and from a cable-modem-type device connected to a consumer's PC. The device is connected to a box attached to a home's electric meter that converts the signals and sends them over a power line. When the signals reach a power transformer, they're peeled off, transferred to a fiber-optic network and uploaded to the Net.

The technology is elegant, at least in theory, but it won't do much for U.S. electric utilities, at least in the short term. That's because European electricity grids are designed in such a way that 100 to 300 homes are served from a single transformer. In the U.S., by contrast, only four to eight homes are typically connected to a single transformer, making the cost of installing this type of Internet access equipment prohibitive.

Nor.Web is teaming up with several unnamed North American utilities to research solutions that would make the technology workable stateside; one possible fix is to use wireless technology to bypass transformer bottlenecks.

But U.S. utilities are mostly looking to move forward with Internet access in other ways, teaming up with local telephone companies and long-distance carriers, and using their own internal communications networks to provide new services.

Dick Hahn, technology VP at Boston Edison, says that powerline technology has other limitations. "You could be a dial-up provider, but if you want to sell a bundled package of data, voice and video, and build a network for the future, it isn't clear that powerline technology will be that medium," he says.

And the short history of data-over-powerlines already has at least one ugly chapter. In 1995 the computer networking firm, Novell, created a stir when it announced its NetWare Embedded Systems Technology, or NEST, which transfers data over powerlines at speeds up to 2 Mbps. Novell, which needed cash to pursue the project, persuaded UtiliCorp United, a Kansas City, Mo., power company, to invest $10 million. But the partnership soured and last year UtiliCorp sued for fraud, claiming that Novell was never serious about the venture. The case is still pending.

In 1997 Novell sold the NEST technology to Intelogis, a Utah start-up that used it to develop a hardware and software kit that networks PCs and printers inside homes or small offices. Intelogis' $199 Passport Plugin went on sale in July. For the time being, the company is concentrating on moving data inside the home, not out of it, says Todd Green, an Intelogis spokesman.

In Europe, though, optimism reigns. The technology is still unproven, and regulatory bodies in each country need to work out how to allocate radio frequencies for the technology, to prevent interference from other signals. But the European Union has stepped in to coordinate the regulatory process, and at least some analysts say they expect any problems to be addressed aggressively.

"Everyone involved is strenuously striving for success, because it's such a huge market", says Vesper.