The Past and Future of PLC

So here's a little PLC history and some thoughts on what's new on this front that could ultimately help power line communications meet its promise.

Seth E. Libby, senior analyst with The Yankee Group, says in the late 1990s Nortel formed a joint venture called Nor.Web with a utility in the U.K. The goal was to use power line communications to offer broadband access to residential and business customers. "There was some hope around that," he says, "but not a lot of details. The utility didn't talk about it." Past requests from xchange asking Nortel for more details on Nor.Web were left unanswered.

At the time, Libby adds, Alcatel and Siemens also were "in the power line game doing power line tests."

Despite the early failings of PLC, the technology has seen some success in Europe, notes Libby. But because of the much higher density of users per transformer abroad, PLC is considered to be a different animal here in the United States. Libby says another key issue here is that power lines can differ significantly city by city in "constitution, structure and age." For example, a grid in Arizona is likely to be much newer than one in Massachusetts, he says. "It's not like fiber" that can be deployed consistently across cities, he says. "The first problem is building a solution that deploys consistently across different power line environments."

Still, Libby says PLC's broad reach into customer homes and businesses makes it a very attractive option. "The potential is enormous and it always will be," he says. "Until someone stands up tomorrow and says 'PLC will never work,' there will always be enough interest in the industry to keep PLC going."

Leif Ericson, business development manager at Southern Telecom Inc., says the Nor.Web activity was at the very early stage of PLC. The 2mbps throughput chip used in that deployment was not suited for use on a commercial scale, he adds. There are new advances in chipsets and coupling technology today that give PLC new impetus, says Ericson. For example, he says, a Spain-based company called DS2 offers a PLC chipset at 45mbps. By this spring or early this summer, he says, the company is set to offer a 200mbps product. Most PLC equipment is based on the DS2 chipsets, says Ericson.

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