IEEE Working Group Advances Broadband Over Power Lines Standard

The IEEE P1901 working group completed a preliminary version of a draft standard called "Standard for Broadband over Power Line Networks: Medium Access Control and Physical Layer Specifications." The first four chapters of the draft Standard have been unanimously approved. In addition, a refined table of contents for the draft standard was presented, detailing how to merge several confirmed proposals. The table of contents was also unanimously approved.


When completed, the project will present a standard for high speed (>100 Mbps at the physical layer) communication devices via alternating current electric power lines, so called Broadband over Power Line (BPL) devices. The standard will use transmission frequencies below 100 MHz. This standard will be usable by all classes of BPL devices, including BPL devices used for the first-mile/last-mile connection (<1500m to the premise) to broadband services as well as BPL devices used in buildings for LANs and other data distribution (<100m between devices).


The draft standard will continue to be developed over the next several months. http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/1901/