NEW DELHI, INDIA: Distributing information over power lines has been a promising technology for decades. However, the RF noise generated in the power line has presented significant challenges.

The most important was reduced data bandwidth. Other issues included the disparity in the power transmission voltages and characteristics from region to region and the difficulty of passing information through transformers used to step up or step down the power voltages.

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For the fast growing Indian market, Broadband over Power Line technology will enable access to affordable communication to the country’s vast rural network.

The biggest technology challenge in India is that several dozen residences are served from a single low voltage (LV) cable line operating at 230–400V which can cause problems such as radiated emissions. This is a cause for concern because of the non-uniform nature of the supply network.

Moreover, typical latency is below 3 ms and latency being dependent on traffic load and number of users, when the number increases it leads to heavy loading of the network which in turn affects VoIP applications.

A wide range of professionals, including real estate developers, urban planners and technology providers now have a greener, more robust, lower-cost option for installing broadband in “last mile” data networks: Ratified by the IEEE earlier this year, the IEEE 1901 Broadband over Power Line (BPL) standard will be a key enabling technology for numerous applications including smart energy, transportation and Local Area Networks (LANs).

Because it is an internationally recognized standard, IEEE 1901 BPL will rationalize power-line communication, which has until now been characterized by proprietary technologies and sluggish growth.

IEEE 1901 BPL delivers data rates of up to 500 Mbps over the same power lines that supply electricity to the business, campus, factory or home The main advantage of 1901 access system is that it is a standard which addresses all access topologies (ring, mesh and tree). Apart from this, 1901 helps in improving Performance and QoS stability in presence of noise (synchronization of the beacon with the actual AC line cycle that varies in the power generation and distribution system).

Every electrical outlet is a potential networking node and – unlike wireless technologies – IEEE 1901 BPL is practically immune to interference and RF barriers such as walls.