Scientist Furthers Work on Data-Transmission Breakthrough

If physicist Luke Stewart can do what he says he can - send voice, video, and data thousands of miles over electric lines at the speed of light - he will produce perhaps the most significant development in communications since Alexander Graham Bell. That could take the company he cofounded in North Dallas, Media Fusion L.L.C., to heights greater than Microsoft in both earnings and market value.

Already, Media Fusion has a $1.5 billion licensing deal with a company representing rural electric cooperatives and their 30 million customers, about a dozen similar deals pending, and $100 million offers to buy equity in the company. That’s a lot of dollar confidence in a system not yet fully proven.

Stewart’s technology sounds like science fiction, complete with microwave lasers blasting through magnetic fields. Like all truly great ideas, however, it is elegant in its simplicity.

While scientists have been trying to figure out a way to send information through electric wires since the 1890s, Stewart instead found a way to hitch a ride on the magnetic field created around those wires when electricity passes through them. This avoids the distortion and signal loss that occur when you try to send information through copper carrying thousands of volts.

The implications are mindboggling. Nearly 85 percent of the world has access to electricity, compared to 12 to 15 percent with phone service, the Internet’s prevailing delivery system. If Stewart’s technology works, the Internet and all its resources would boldly go where they have never gone before. The best example is rural America, where fiber optic lines and cable wires remain a far-off vision due to the cost of stringing high-speed data or cable wires to just a few homes per square mile. Or even third world countries, where the Information Age has passed by most of the population.

Still, it seems almost daily that we hear about another multibillion-dollar deal merging two phone companies. Or we’ll read about a phone company buying a cable company. They’re trying to find more ways to bring information to us, but they have yet to solve the problem. Their pipelines are on the verge of bursting at the seams.

Take video, for example, which requires a vast amount of capacity to work correctly. Images continue to arrive in herky-jerky fashion with audio that makes it seem like you’re watching an overdubbed Kung Fu fight film. Stewart claims his technology has such great capacity that streaming video will arrive even better than it does on the best cable systems available.

How does Stewart’s invention work? The math and physics are extremely complicated, but the concept is relatively simple: substitute the nation’s far-reaching, highly maintained electric power grid for all those telephone wires, fiber optic networks, and cable lines that now form the backbone of the communications industry. Then, using specific microwave frequencies, hitch a ride on the magnetic field created when electricity passes through those lines. Whether you’re in the office or at home, just plug into a chip-laden, preprogrammed device that Stewart calls a nightlight and start accessing data, entertainment, and communications. It’s as simple as turning a light switch on and off.

Stewart knows this will work because you can hear a lightning strike in Miami through the electric grid all the way to San Diego. Once he realized that, he figured he could find a way to send communications signals through the electric grid, too. It was just a matter of working out the details.

And if anyone could work that out, it would be Stewart, a math whiz since childhood whose résumé includes Navy training in nuclear propulsion and weapons systems, and college studies in laser-optics, computer science, and computer architecture. For most of his career, he has been an independent defense contractor, working on classified laser-guided weapons systems and imaging systems used to detect submarines. He also worked on the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, and he still consults regularly with top-secret agencies in Washington, D.C.

While he was leading classified imaging projects at a defense think tank in San Diego, he found time in the mid-1980s to work with a fledgling Microsoft Corp. to develop what are called dynamic link libraries, memory management programs at the heart of Microsoft’s software. In fact, Microsoft once described Stewart in a national ad as a visionary, though Stewart finds the label too confining. "Visionary kind of gives you this idea that you don’t know enough about business because you’re too esoteric," the 45-year-old native Texan says.

Read more about Powerline Area Networking on BetaNews.