The Electric Kool-Aid Bandwidth Test (continued)

For that price, anyone with electricity running into their homes would have access to an almost unimaginable amount of bandwidth. Where available, a typical DSL line or cable modem can provide speeds up to about 8 Mbps. Even the fiber-optic trunk lines that move the data around the country do so at only up to 10 Gbps. Media Fusion was talking about a network that operated at exobits - more than 1 billion gigabits - per second. That would translate, the company said, into 2 Gbits right in your home: more bandwidth than you'd ever know what to do with. In a flash of Stewart's genius, Media Fusion had apparently solved the last-mile problem once and for all.

Equally amazing was Stewart's claim that the night-lights would obviate the need for routers. "I always get a kick out of talking to telecom engineers," he laughed. "'Well, our photons are as fast as your electrons.' Yeah, until it hits the router. Ha! And then it just eats crap!"

Up to that point, the largest PLC project had been a joint venture between Nortel and British company United Utilities. Known as Nor.Web, the combined entity conducted trials of a power line system in England. After three years of testing, the companies determined that it was in fact possible to send data over power lines, just not economically viable. They abandoned the venture in 1999.

At least a dozen companies in the US and Europe are now attempting to succeed where Nor.Web failed. In July, German utility RWE flipped the switch on a 2-Mbit trial system. A US company called Ambient, working with Cisco, has conducted successful alpha tests with utility Con Edison in New York.

Triumphantly, Stewart would deliver the Net and all that came with it to the rural backwaters of the world. And in the process, he'd make trillions.

The greatest obstacle to power line communications involves preserving the data when the electricity travels through a transformer. As the voltage is stepped down from long distance lines to be sent to individual homes, the data signal is stripped off the wire. Small, bridgelike devices are therefore required to link each transformer. In the US, one transformer serves only about 10 houses, creating the need for hundreds of thousands of these new devices.

Stewart's patented discovery promised to get around the problem. Researching in the MIT library one day, he overheard a couple of ham radio operators discussing how lightning strikes in Africa had interfered with their transmissions. The implication, he said, was that "electrons travel thousands of miles without any signal loss." And then it hit him: The magnetic field surrounding an electrical wire, a well-known but little-used property of physics, could be employed to send data.

"That was an epiphany for me," he recalled. "Obviously we can't use lightning to call Mom - too dangerous. So what can we do? We can look at what happens when high voltage flows. What happens to the material around the conductor? Is there anything that happens while the voltage flows back and forth that can be captured, extracted, and identified at a later time so that you can make sense out of it?"

His answer: Use a maser - the microwave equivalent of a laser - to fuse the data onto the magnetic field surrounding the wire. Once the data was in the field, quantum switches would shove it down the wire "at damn near light speed," said Stewart, right to your wall outlet. Riding on the magnetic field, the analog signal would shoot through the transformer without so much as a hiccup.

Stewart seemed aware of the fact - alluded to by the anxious executive I had spoken with - that many scientists weren't buying his theory. The patent, according to some physicists who examined it, couldn't be translated into a working system. No masers or Q switches have been proven capable of adding and removing data in a magnetic field. Stewart's invention would require a wholesale rethinking of modern physics. "Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, one of the most robust deductive creations of human intelligence, simply doesn't describe how to use a field as a waveguide," said Paul Grant, a condensed matter physicist and a science fellow at the Electric Power Research Institute, "not to me or any physicist I've consulted with."

Revolutionary developments in science, Stewart countered, require a paradigm shift, often led by a Copernicus-like renegade. Physicists were locked into preconceived notions when it came to ASCM. "Whenever you are solving a science problem," he said, "when you come in with a prejudice, then you lose the ability to think freely."

Besides, all skepticism and disbelief would fade, he reasoned, when Media Fusion demonstrated the technology via a dramatic broadband test, sending HDTV across the grid for the public to see. According to Stewart, the company had negotiated with Dallas media giant Belo to provide the signal for the test, which had been delayed several times but was now scheduled for March 15, 2000.

Stewart believed the demo would do more than show the world the working technology; it would create a chain reaction of massive investment, industry upheaval, and government support. Triumphantly, he would deliver the Internet, and all the development and education that came with it, to the rural backwaters of the world. And in the process, he'd make trillions.

It all sounded too good to be true, and Stewart seemed to sense my lingering doubts. As I climbed into my car at the end of the day, he shook my hand firmly and looked me squarely in the eye. "We will succeed," he said. "It's just a matter of time. We're not afraid of anything."

And why should he have been? In February 2000, Stewart held a US patent; the broadband test was only weeks away; and he counted some very powerful people among his allies. In Washington, Media Fusion had clearly struck a nerve with the notion of bringing bandwidth to rural America. In the tech industry, the line for the Media Fusion bandwagon stretched around the block.

A retired Navy rear admiral named James Carey, then Media Fusion's director of government relations, opened doors on Capitol Hill for Stewart. It was Carey, the former chair of the Federal Maritime Commission, who recruited McAullife and Livingston onto the board. The technology, Carey said, was for real - even if he didn't quite understand it. "I know enough to know if something makes common sense or not," he said. "As near as I can tell, the things that needed to be done to have technical people in the process have been done."

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