Each year we watch the broadband over powerline (BPL) industry proclaim that this year is "the year" BPL will shine, and each year we see limited trials and hesitant utilities, yet no absence of optimistic chatter from the FCC and BPL hardware vendors. The latest bubbly press release comes courtesy of a company named Trimax, who praises the FCC's deregulation of BPL nearly a month after the move.

The release (and the calendar) got us thinking: wasn't BPL supposed to have been a major broadband player by now? BPL was tagged the "great broadband hope" by the last FCC commissioner and championed as a potential competitive panacea by the current one. Our first ever mention of it had our (and your) hearts aflutter.

Some thought broadband would soon be pouring from every electrical outlet, offering a viable third player in a market many think is little more than a stagnant coordinated duopoly. Kevin Martin declared BPL held "great promise" as a "ubiquitous broadband solution" that could help the country achieve President Bush's declaration of universal broadband by 2007.

Meanwhile, back in reality, a flood of radio engineers pointed out that powerlines really weren't suitable for bandwidth transmission. Interference issues were documented, trials in a number of foreign countries were shut down and even the NTIA began to worry that the technology wasn't fully cooked.

BPL skepticism began to set in...unless you worked at the FCC or for a BPL hardware vendor.

Back in 2004, fans of the tech didn't like our suggestion that BPL was probably only a niche technology: "I find that your lean is clearly anti-BPL and it is slanting the news to that extreme - you are doing the public no good service with that outdated view. Not only is BPL here to stay and likely to account for 33% of Broadband in the next few years, but it is very important to communications going foreward (sic) in the U.S. and the world."

Fast forward nearly three years: The FCC's last broadband report (pdf) listed 5,859 BPL customers in the United States as of December, 2005. The majority of those customers are still participating in utility trials that may or may not continue. Many utilities are interested in BPL solely as a smart-network monitoring solution and aren't sold on becoming broadband providers.

Perhaps 2007 will be the BPL industry's lucky year?