US FCC Approves Broadband over Powerlines
After years in the pipeline, the US Federal Communications Commission has finally given the green light to proceed with broadband over powerlines.
In a Memorandum Opinion and Order adopted on Thursday, the FCC affirmed the right of broadband power line (BPL) operators to provide communications services over power transmission lines provided their services don’t interfere with existing radio services …
Efforts to use electricity cables to transmit data took a step forward in Europe earlier this year with the publication of an open specification for power line communications (PLC).
The Open PLC European Research Alliance (OPERA), partly funded by the European Commission, said its specification will accelerate the development of products that use power lines for broadband Internet access, voice and video services, as well as utility applications such as automatic meter reading.
Products based on the specification will deliver data at speeds of more than 200Mbps, according to OPERA. It is based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) modulation and offers both Frequency Division (FD) and Time Division (TD) repeating capabilities.
Today, Meralco is already in the bandwidth business by selling broadband fiber to certain corporate customers. Would they probably be interested in introducing powerline communications (PLC) to retail customers? Retail products already exist in the market such as the Netgear HDXB101 Powerline HD Ethernet Adapter Kit
It would also be interesting to note that OFDM is also the technology being used by WiMAX. Which incidentally is considered an alternative to powerline communications.
