- FAYETTEVILLE, Tenn. - He
didn't fly a kite during a thunderstorm, but the man plugging a cable into
roadside electric lines looked as foolhardy as Benjamin Franklin with his
key to Gina Warren.
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- Now public information specialist at Fayetteville Public
Utilities, Warren remembered that day years ago.
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- "I thought he was going to kill himself!" she
recalled last week.
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- It was her first glimpse of inventor Wayne Sanderson
testing his project to send information over power lines in rural Lincoln
County in 1997.
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- Sanderson, who holds both a master's degree and a doctorate
in electrical engineering, has developed a system, now being tested with
Fayetteville Public Utilities, that sends Internet information over power
lines. It's a development of the system Sanderson's Alabama company, PowerComm
Systems, put into place in Cullman last year.
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- Sanderson's Tennessee company, GridStream Technologies,
has also installed a system serving customers in Washington state. And
just this month, Calvin Eads became the first customer in Tennessee to
plug his computer into a modem that was simply connected to the wall electrical
outlet in his home in Park City, about nine miles south of Fayetteville.
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- "I think this technology is great," Eads said
recently, demonstrating the speed of the electrical connection in his den.
"One reason I'm interested is because I'll get the same quality service
(as cable) and it will be cheaper."
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- Eads, retired from Chrysler as a maintenance supervisor,
said he has always enjoyed learning about technological innovations.
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- "I believe this system will go," Eads said.
"I know for a fact it works, and it works good."
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- 'Can't be done'
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- The idea of sending broadband waves over electrical lines
doesn't seem as far-fetched now as it did when Sanderson began thinking
about it in the mid-1990s. Now, systems to put Internet signals over electrical
lines are being put into place in Europe.
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- But about nine years ago, back before he'd heard of anyone
else doing it, when Sanderson ran the idea by some professors he knew at
Georgia Tech, they said it couldn't be done.
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- Sanderson wasn't dissuaded.
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- His background was a good fit with his task. He has monitored
the quality of power transmissions while working for Square D, a supplier
of electrical distribution, industrial control and automation products,
systems and services. He's worked on cable modems for Motorola in Huntsville.
Plus, communications with other electrical professors gave him a sense
of the capabilities of electrical lines that were not being tapped.
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- His own home situation - located way off the road in
a lovely spot of nowhere, near the Molino community about 10 miles from
Fayetteville - made him very aware of the need for rural Internet access.
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- And his curiosity about the possibilities, along with
conversations with professors he worked with when he taught at Vanderbilt,
Tennessee Technological University, and other colleges, gave him the tools
to develop new ways to tame electrical current. He now holds five patents
for devices and has three pending.
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- "This can extend service to people in rural areas,"
Sanderson said last week, relaxing in his home office. "Think of the
potential - like remote learning for homeschoolers and remote telemetry
for medical uses. I'd really like to work on that application."
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- But first, Sanderson is focusing on getting the Lincoln
County system up and running and working on proposals for Winchester and
other nearby cities.
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- The system has the capability to be as fast as the cable-fed
data sent into it. But since Sanderson's relay boxes can be placed as infrequently
as one every half mile and require only about an hour of a lineman's work
to hook into the power line, his system is significantly cheaper to install
than cable Internet systems.
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- The cost savings is what makes it feasible to provide
service for customers scattered in rural areas, where the investment to
run cable would take years to recover.
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- It was that possibility that persuaded officials at Fayetteville
Public Utilities, which also provides cable service, to agree to work with
Sanderson as he developed his system.
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- "We're always looking at other avenues where we
can provide service to customers in rural areas at a reasonable cost,"
said Britt Dye, manager of FPU's electric and telecommunications operations,
discussing Sanderson's pilot project from his office in Fayetteville earlier
this month.
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- Sanderson's system can also help an electric company.
The relay boxes send information both ways - to the customer, but also
back to the electric company. If a tree limb rubs the lines and disrupts
electrical service, Sanderson said, his system can pinpoint the problem,
often before there is a failure.
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- Most utilities rely on customer reports before sending
out repair crews to simply drive along the lines to try to spot the problem.
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- Sanderson's system offers the possibility of transmitting
cable TV signals, too, but Sanderson said that will come with the next
generation of upgrades. The available frequency band is adequate for Internet
signals, but he said he'd need more room for TV channels.
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- Even with the developments in wireless Internet transmitting,
Sanderson said there is a place for his innovations. Wireless transmissions
travel at about the speed of dial-up connections, and only follow straight-line
paths.
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- "This will follow the wires," Sanderson said.
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- One corner of the world
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- Sanderson's project has mushroomed into a business he
and his wife, Rebecca, work on together from their home. Supplies crowd
the basement of their home, and their top floor is dedicated to work tables
for assembly.
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- "Our living space has shrunk to this little room
and our bedroom," Rebecca Sanderson said last week, laughing as she
moved a box of connectors newly arrived from Taiwan to set out cups of
chocolate coffee in the kitchen. "I will know he has made it when
he can hire somebody to take my place."
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- Rebecca's master's in mathematics from Vanderbilt, with
additional graduate work in Vanderbilt's Divinity School, make her an unusual
choice to be in charge of such mundane matters as accounting and taxes.
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- Wayne Sanderson hopes that the day of moving the business
out of their home is less than a year away.
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- In addition to their own three grown children, one of
whom is working on his doctorate in material science, their employees include
some of their sons' college friends. Sanderson wants to see the business
expand to offer more jobs to the county's brightest youngsters.
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- "I really want to do that," Sanderson said.
"I've got some pretty strong feelings about wanting to create jobs
for young people in town. We only need one deployment to jump to the next
level, then we'll move it to town."
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- With a deployment of systems he has proposed now, Sanderson
said it's reasonable for him to be planning for 40 or 50 employees by this
summer, and up to 100 in a year. Had the funding come through for more
research and development earlier, he would be even further along, but even
with competition, he's confident that his system offers cleaner transmissions
over longer distances than competitors.
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- "When he started out, he was way ahead of everybody,"
Rebecca Sanderson said. "Now he's not as far ahead, but it's a huge
market, and we're not looking to be Bill Gates. We just want our own little
corner of the world."
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- She paused for a minute to look out of the window to
the woods surrounding their hill top home, then continued, adding with
a smile.
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- "And if this doesn't work out, we're going to take
a job truck-driving together," she said. "But Wayne will have
to do all the backing up."
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