North West Water Plc, a UK regional water and electricity company owned by United Utilities Corp is to begin trying out a system to use its electricity cables for high speed digital telecommunications. The technology was developed within the group’s NorWeb Communications Ltd division, which was granted a National Telecommunications Operators licence two years ago by the Department of Trade & Industry. For the last couple of years the group has concentrated its efforts within the business sector in the North West of England, in direct competition with the likes of British Telecommunications Plc and Mercury Communications Ltd. The group outlined plans to lay fiber cables with its electricity lines as early as April 1994 (CI No 2,389). And compared with the cost of digging up the ground to lay traditional telephone lines, NorWeb’s plan to combine electricity and telephony over on the same mains power cables will dramatically reduce overheads. Following the initial trials, about 3,000 customers in Greater Manchester will take part in the scheme to ensure the system works on a larger scale, and to ensure it is a service people will be prepared to pay for, before touting the technology worldwide. Patents for the technology have alr eady been filed with UK authorities and NorWeb’s United Utilities Plc parent has been working with US power giant Utilicorp and is said to be in the process of firming up partnerships in Australia and New Zealand. NorWeb’s business development manager David Healey said the new Power-line Communications would deliver clearer digital phone calls than existing British Telecom and cable networks. And perhaps more importantly, by the end of the decade the extra bandwidth has potential to provide a solution to some of the capacity problems that face Internet users – but realistically, four years within the technology world is a lifetime away.
