League Says BPL Group Should Embrace, Not Reject, Recent ARRL Proposals

NEWINGTON, CT, Nov 23, 2005--In a Reply to Opposition filed this week, the ARRL maintains that changes it recently proposed to the FCC's Part 15 BPL rules provide a golden opportunity for the BPL industry and the FCC. The League was responding to a November 2 United Power Line Council (UPLC) Motion opposing and seeking dismissal of the ARRL's Petition for a Further Notice of Proposed Rule Making, filed last month in the BPL proceeding, WT Docket 04-37.

"As a general observation, it is difficult to understand the rationale for UPLC's knee-jerk response to ARRL's Petition," the League said in its Reply to Opposition. "On its face, the Petition does no more than to state a reasonable basis for a principled accommodation for all concerned with, or about, access BPL. This would include BPL operators."

The ARRL contended that the UPLC "would better serve its members by embracing the ARRL Petition, rather than rejecting it" and said its proposals represent "the last clear chance to prevent substantial interference from BPL deployments."

The League's October Petition suggests that incorporating three elements into the BPL rules the Commission adopted last year would essentially resolve all issues that the ARRL and the Amateur Service have with access BPL:

• Prohibiting all access BPL systems from using Amateur Radio allocations--except the five channels at 5 MHz, which the current HomePlug system architecture does not notch.

• Prohibiting access BPL systems from using HF bands on medium-voltage power lines.

• Measuring signal decay from access BPL systems using a more accurate 20 dB/decade extrapolation factor rather than the 40 dB/decade factor the current rules support.

Adopting its proposals, the League argued in its October filing, would result in a more robust product that meets the FCC's stated goals of accommodating BPL as an additional broadband option while protecting licensed radio services. "The present BPL rules achieve the first of the goals, but they are woefully inadequate to meet the second," the ARRL argued in its Petition.

Calling the UPLC's opposition to its proposals "short sighted," the League said the UPLC "cannot in good faith" argue that the present BPL rules are in any way sufficient to prevent or mitigate interference to Amateur Radio. "They are not sufficient, as has been demonstrated time and time again in BPL test deployments," the ARRL contended this week.

To punch up that point, the League called "pure sophistry" and "absurd and false" UPLC's claim in its Motion that BPL operators using HF on medium-voltage power lines "have been very effective in mitigating rare instances of interference to Amateur Radio users." In support of that assertion, UPLC cited a July 22, 2004, letter from Bruce Franca, then Deputy Chief of the FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology (OET), to Tom Brown, N4TAB. Franca's letter claimed that Progress Energy's BPL pilot project in the Raleigh, North Carolina, area complied with FCC rules.

Responding to Franca that same day, ARRL CEO David Sumner, K1ZZ, at the time noted the presence of ongoing interference and rebutted Franca's assertions. He specifically cautioned FCC to "not permit its conclusions to be erroneously represented as having given the Progress Energy trials a 'clean bill of health'"--precisely what UPLC is now attempting, he said. A copy of Sumner's letter was attached to this week's League filing.

UPLC failed to mention that interference from the Raleigh system to numerous Amateur Radio operators "persisted and was not resolved until the system was shut down," the League pointed out this week.

ARRL General Counsel Chris Imlay, W3KD, thinks it's ironic that UPLC chose that particular piece of FCC correspondence to buttress its case. "Mr Sumner rebutted Franca's letter in the Raleigh situation, and Franca never responded, despite repeated promises to do so," he said. "We are now a year and four months down the road."

In this week's filing, the League said its Petition seeks to create additional rules governing BPL that, with those already on the books, would "be sufficient to allow ARRL to withdraw its pending Petition for Reconsideration" in the proceeding. In addition, the ARRL reiterated its position that certain BPL systems mentioned in the October Petition "present manageable interference potential" that "can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis." Its proposals, the League said, provide the BPL industry and the FCC with the opportunity to create an RF environment that's not substantially degraded for licensed radio services and that permits BPL to develop "without the competitive handicap of fundamental incompatibility with licensed services" and removes any remaining regulatory uncertainty.

The ARRL concluded by urging the Commission to "proceed expeditiously to issue a further Notice of Proposed Rule Making, adopt the proposed rules, and remove the obstacles to a responsible rollout of access BPL that were either created, or not resolved, by the [BPL] Report and Order."

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