North Carolina is looking to restrict municipal broadband, and UTC is fighting against it. This week UTC and seven other signatories (including the American Public Power Association, Alcatel-Lucent, Google and Intel) sent a letter to the North Carolina legislature opposing a bill that would place a moratorium on public broadband deployments, such as those by municipal utilities. That succeeded in getting legislators to back off a complete ban, but they did decide to consider legislation that would restrict the funding of such broadband deployments.

Specifically, the draft bill would require localities to go through a referendum process to obtain funding, and UTC and other proponents of municipal broadband are concerned that these restrictions could have the same practical effect as a ban because incumbent providers such as AT&T and Time Warner can launch massive advertising campaigns against any such referendum. Although the sponsor of the bill, Sen. Hoyle stated that the bill would grandfather existing municipal broadband deployments, the bill would require any municipal broadband financing, improvement, upgrade or repair to be funded with general obligation bonds. As such, it may restrict existing and future deployments. Although the bill has been introduced, it has not been given a bill number yet. UTC will post the bill and report developments as they become available.

In comments provided to the OpenHAN task force, Google stated that the home area network has zero physical security from consumer tampering. Google comments continue that any device in the home can be tampered with at any time.

Short of physical inspection, it may be impossible to determine whether physical tampering of a HAN device has occurred. Once an attacker has physical access to a device and a (basically) infinite amount of time to modify the device, all devices on the network (and the network itself) becomes suspect. Read more »

(Washington, DC) While energy companies and tech suppliers concentrate on constructing smart grids, consumers will ultimately determine the success of next-generation utility networks, top government and business leaders agreed here today at "Power in Numbers: Unleashing Innovation in Home Energy Use," a conference hosted by Google in partnership with The Climate Group.

"We're really a consumer services company" Jason Few, President of Houston, TX-based electric utility Reliant Energy said. "Consumers are making power purchase decisions without any information. We don’t believe that is a good experience." To address the problem, Reliant is working with energy management tech provider Tendril Networks to empower consumers, Few said, offering homes that have advanced meters technological tools for managing energy consumption, including an in-home monitor that displays real-time information. Reliant Energy is focused on consumer innovation because it is a competitive energy provider but few utilities are motivated to enhance consumer capabilities because they don't face competition, according to Tendril Networks CEO Adrian Tuck. "If we don't solve that problem, then the [smart grid] technology will flounder," Tuck said. Read more »