BPL to enable affordable communication to rural India

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.

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BPL’s in-premises installation costs are low mainly because of couple of reasons. One is that the cost of modem -- it offers many synergies with fiber-to-the-premises networking technologies which have always had an economic challenge with in-premises data distribution.

The other being, in India where broadband provides need to invest a lot of money in laying cables and infrastructure in the rural areas which is quiet high and BPL circumvents this investment in cost. For a recently ratified standard, IEEE 1901TM BPL has already achieved a remarkably advanced implementation infrastructure, including testing and certification programs that are up and running and a rising wave of new products.

Using a data modem that generates a carrier signal 50 MHz, products compliant with IEEE 1901TM can transmit data of 500 Mbps over standard AC power lines operating at any voltage. The data rate is easily sufficient to carry video information and exceeds the data rates of most wireless networking technologies.

IEEE 1901TM BPL’s transmission distances far exceed those of wireless. Devices compliant with the standard will have ranges of up to 1500 m. Repeaters can be installed to extend transmission range into kilometers for smart grid applications.

The arrival of a robust, standardized BPL technology provides the opportunity to introduce a new, more capable, less expensive hybrid network architecture that leverages the advantages of fiber, power line and wireless networking technologies. In particular, wireless networks can be utilized where they have always made the most sense — the last few meters between the wireless node and end user devices such as a PC, TV or cell phone.

Fiber no longer has to be pulled through the walls of homes, businesses and schools but can be used to provide high-speed interconnection from the head end to the pedestal.

The concept of Smart Grid technologies have also been taken into consideration by the IEEE 1901TM BPL working group.

Although power usage information from individual homes and many businesses may be small in terms of data bandwidth requirements, from the electric utilities’ perspective the combined information flow becomes a torrent of data that requires a broadband connections such as IEEE 1901’s 500 Mbps.

In addition, the integration of distribution of power produced by micro-generation presents some significant challenges for Smart Grid of the future, including local storage. IEEE 1901TM BPL enables real time management of two-ways power flows for balancing generation and consumption.

Despite India’s power grid being not as advanced as developed countries, BPL is likely to make an impact as its benefits far outweigh its drawbacks. Corporate India could quickly embrace BPL because of its inherent advantages over Ethernet.

The author is Chair, IEEE SIG, IEEE Standards Association