Manassas, Virginia was the first US city to see a real, non-trial launch of broadband over powerline (BPL) technology. However, BPL has floundered the last few years because of its inherent potential for interference with amateur and emergency radio, its irrelevance in the face of next-generation speeds, and the unavoidable fact that many utilities simply didn't want to be broadband providers.

After buying the flailing network from companies who once heralded it as proof BPL was a major broadband player, the city has spent a total of $1.6 million on it, and pour in an additional $100,000 or so every month. With city residents lured away by faster alternatives, leaders have had the network on life support for months, and are still debating over whether to pull the plug:It's unfortunate for Manassas, which was hailed by BPL hardware vendors and former FCC boss Michael Powell as the pinnacle of broadband achievement just five years ago. Those companies (like Comtek, who took at adversarial role against those worried about interference) have since moved on to pitch their hardware to energy utilities as part of smart energy networking solutions. Powell, who once called BPL the "great broadband hope," has since moved on to a life of highly paid work at telecom think tanks. The city however still sits struggling with a technology and cash-guzzling network that's become entirely irrelevant.

Yesterday we issued a report exploring how Verizon was again hinting at how they believed metered billing is inevitable. We also discussed how yet again, you had an ISP suggesting that a shift to metered billing was financially necessary (not true) and that the ISP desire to shift to metered billing was dictated by some kind of altruism (also not true). Apparently, this position upset Todd Spangler over at Multichannel News, who somewhere in between taking pot shots at "edgy bloggers" and "clueless" flat-rate pricing proponents arrives at his central thesis: that consumption-based billing is inevitable:Again, the inference that the flat-rate pricing model mysteriously doesn't offer the money needed to fund investment is simply not true, should you care to look at any major ISP balance sheet or 10-K. Internet usage data (at least the data not coming from DC lobbyists pushing the "Exaflood") indicates that future capacity demand can be met with only modest capacity upgrades.

You might remember Ohio-based Buckeye Cablesystems for when they came down hard on the heads of cable modem upcappers back in 2002, going so far as to bring in the FBI to investigate users who were trying to squeeze extra bandwidth out of the cable system. It's now 2009, and Buckeye has found a much better solution for bandwidth-hungry customers -- they've started a fiber to the home trial in Toledo, but they're installing it without having to dig up any existing infrastructure thanks to a new technology by Kabel-X. From the Kabel-X description of the technology:Delicious, just like the white filling of an Oreo. Those interested can watch this video for more detail.

Over the years we've seen no limit of specialized hardware, software or other gadgetry promising to defeat the laws of physics and speed up your Internet connection above and beyond its basic capabilities. From the "Juice Boosted" scam to Earthlink's latest absurd acceleration ploy, by and large these are all snake oil. Even well-intentioned ideas to deploy new, faster protocols 99.4% of the time wind up being little more than blistering hype. With that in mind, Google today issued a post over at the Chrome blog claiming they were working on a new protocol they insist could double the speed of everyday browsing: story continues..

Earlier this week, blogger and 25-year communications industry vet Brough Turner started a bit of a ruckus with a blog post suggesting that AT&T's wireless broadband network problems were partially AT&T's fault, and not just attributable to the massive influx of data-hungry iPhone users. Though he admittedly didn't have access to the AT&T network guts or first hand experience running a HSDPA GSM network, Turner speculated that AT&T had misconfigured their network, specifically in terms of latency and RNC buffers:It's fairly amazing how far and wide Turner's analysis resonated across the Internet, with literally dozens of stories quickly popping up on how AT&T's problems may have been partially their own fault. That of course put AT&T's primary wireless PR protectorate Seth Bloom back into his unenviable position of having to play public relations bomb disposal, and Bloom spent the week contacting dozens of blogs to deny the allegation.