From: SAB2004 [SAB2004@COMPUTER.ORG] on behalf of Don Wright [don@LEXMARK.COM]
Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2004 7:10 PM
To: SAB2004@COMPUTER.ORG
Subject: Report re: Call for Interest in Standards on Broadband over Power Lines meeting, 7 June 2004

Here is a report on Monday's session on Broadband over Powerline held in Denver. This summary was sent to the IEEE USA CCIP reflector. I wasn't there so I can't vouch for the accuracy or validity of the summary but I have no reason to believe it is not accurate.

*******************************************
Don Wright don@lexmark.com

Chair, IEEE SA Standards Board
Member, IEEE-ISTO Board of Directors
f.wright@ieee.org / f.wright@computer.org

Director, Alliances and Standards
Lexmark International
740 New Circle Rd C14/082-3
Lexington, Ky 40550
859-825-4808 (phone) 603-963-8352 (fax)
*******************************************

----- Forwarded by Don Wright/Lex/Lexmark on 06/09/2004 08:05 PM -----

"Robert Powers" <rpowers3@EARTHLINK.NET>
Sent by: owner-ieeeusa-ccip@LISTSERV.IEEE.ORG

06/09/2004 01:44 PM
Please respond to rpowers3

To: "CCIP" <ieeeusa-ccip@IEEE.ORG>
cc:
Subject: Report re "Call for Interest in Standards on Broadband over PL. wer Lines meeting, 7Je2004

Per plan, I did attend the BPL meeting in Denver, which was part of a big Power Engineering Society (PES) meeting. Stan Klein was also able to attend at least part of the session, having obligations for other simultaneous meetings. I didn't actually count, but I'd say there were about 50 or so attendees, and there was much interaction among them. They were asked to give the moderator (Jim Carlo, president of IEEE Standards Association) their business cards, and he will e-send copies of those cards to whoever gave him a card. So I expect I'll be able to send that e-info to CCIP at some later date.
Basic bottom line was that everybody agreed that solving the issues of interference *from* and *to* BPL was the sine qua non of BPL. If those questions can't be satisfactorily resolved, then BPL won't survive. There were some interesting suggestions as to resolution, which I'll mention later on herein.
Many of the attendees had read the CCIP submission to the FCC, re BPL. I only got one negative comment about it, from John Estey. I do NOT suggest that you/we argue with John about his interpretation, because I believe (and tried to explain to him) that he was fully misinterpreting the point of our submission. He seemed to interpret it as adressing "political" issues rather than "technical" issues. I tried to show him that it was fully focussed on the technical issue(s) of interference, and that we were not specifically trying to politically protect specific licensed users, like hams. So let's just drop that arguement.
Presentations -------------------- Jim Carlo (j.carlo@ieee.org), President of the IEEE Standards Association, introduced and ran the session. He stated that all the presentations made at the meeting will be posted at www.standards.ieee.org, so you can get them all in detail from their electronic "slides."
Bruce Dietzman, VP, PES Technical Activities, stressed the importance of and his interest in standards for reliability of electric power systems. Reliability of power systems was clearly one of the hot topics at the meeting -- including but not at all limited to the interference issues that were CCIPs focus. Power suppliers do expect to use BPL for their own purposes, such as monitoring system performance, e-reading power meters, notifying the company of problems that have occurred or are about to occur.
John Newberry (from Britain, VP PES Technical Activities) stated that a low-frequency standard is about to be published. He strongly supports the creation of standards for BPL. He referred to the frequency band 1.6 to 30 MHz as the "HF" band relevant to BPL. And he defines "broadband" as megabits per second, not gigabits per second -- at least for purposes of BPL.
Eric Gunther, EnerNex Corporation, highlighted (a) interference to and from BPL and ( b) the impact of power system topology on the potential services that might be offered by BPL, as his top issues. He stressed issues (a) interference to and from BPL, and (b) the impact of power system topology on the potential BPL services. He referred to a website www.iecsa.org, for further info. He emphasized the potential use of BPL for control of the power systems.
Bruce Benz, of Amperion, talked about how BPL is important to the electric power industry. He says that now BPL can supply up to 24 Mb/s, and in the future maybe 100 Mb/s. BPL will be used to identify noise sources on power lines, and that can be used to actually reduce interference noise. They would continue to use BPL for power system control, even if/when fiber and wireless take over for gigabit per second services.
Jim Mollenkopf, of Current Technologies, happened to sit next to me at the meeting. He says that they now can supply 2.4 Mb/s symmetrical service to homes. He was very interested in the CD that Carl Stevenson sent me, showing how interference from BPL in Emmaus Pennsylvania can affect ham radio reception. He actually was able to copy that CD onto his laptop's hard drive, so he can view it later. His company has a BPL demonstration set up in Potomac Maryland. And we are invited to go there and see that demo. Stan Klein may be able to do that. And I do urge Carl Stevenson and anybody else who might be able to do so to contact Jim and either discuss or actually go see that demo. His contact info: 301/515-7617, ext. 212, and jim.mollenkopf@currenttechnologies.com.
Eric Sacher, from Serendipity Systems, Inc. did give a presentation, but I failed to note any particularly new points that he made.
Fred Marks stressed the importance of having accepted standards for interference radiation.
Joseph Marsilli, of Main.net, Power Line Communications, Inc. now uses about 20 Mb/s BPL, and hopes for 200 Mb/s. They use BPL on their "medium voltage" (up to 30,000 volts) systems, to feed their lower-voltage systems.
Ed Hare, of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL, a ham-radio entity) stressed that ham radio service is a big player in the bands that BPL would use, but definitely not the only radio service that could be affected by BPL. Further info at www.arrl.org/bpl, and www.arrl.org/~ehare/bpl/hyperlinks.html, and BPLandHamRadio@yahoogroups.com. His email: ehare@arrl.org.
Alex Gellman, of Panasonic. I failed to note any new strong points that he made.
Mark Laubach, of Broadband Physics, Inc., made a very interesting presentation, including demonstration of some mechanisms that could be used to control to/from interference. For example, he showed a system by which he could put "notches" into the spectrum used by BPL. In those "notches" the BPL power level would be reduced by 30 to 50 decibels; so obviously there would be either reduced or no interference to/from other sysems using that particular spectrum. So, in some particular geographic area, the BPL user could explore the spectrum usage and licenses, and determine which spectrum should be notched out, to prevent either interference either to or from BPL. Mark's primary issues obviously included interference, but also assurance of reliable service at specific data rates. His data rate target for BPL is 100 Mb/s or more, using his "sub-band division multiples (SDM)" technology. That technology can provide 2 to 12 Mb/s pe! r hertz. Mark also pointed out that electric power ! systems are not standardized worldwide. For example; in the USA, "high voltage" lines range from 20 kV up to about 200 kV. But in some other countries "high voltage" lines are lines of ABOVE 200 kV. Reference to his technology: www.broadbandphysics.com.

Oleg Logvinov, of Arkados Inc., and Home Plug Alliance, gave a co-presentation with Brian Wenger, of Earthlink. Earthlink has about 4 million dial-up customers and about 1 million broadband DSL customers. He points out that DSL is still not really standardized, nor is cable broadband. Home Plug Alliance makes adapters fro in-home networks. He says that about 97% of homes have the capability of at least 1.5 Mb/s; and a "majority" of homes have the capability of about 5 Mb/s. To reach Brian: brian@corp.earthlink.net.
Victor Dominguez (also known as Victor Dominguez Richards, for reasons that I can't explain), of DS2. DS2 is a start-up company, grown to about 90 employees, a $200 million company. He stressed the need for , a single standard for fiber, BPL, and in-house distribution systems. Their system can handle 200 Mb/s. He suggested that IEEE create a study group to coordinate with ETSI and others, including the Home Plug Alliance, to create standards for mitigation of both interference and other reliability problems, standards for universal Powerline Carriers (PLCs), PLC access standards, and in-home PLC standards.
Summary and Next Steps session.
Terry Burns, chair of a standards group for BPL, maintains that since FCC is working on interference standards, there may be no need for IEEE to do such standards work. I pointed out, noting that my comment was based on my experience as former Chief Scientist at FCC, that although FCC does have some very bright and competent engineers, they do not necessarily have all the specific expertise that is needed in some specific area to create optimal standards; so IEEE's wider experience-base is vital to reaching successful standards.
There was general agreement, of course, that solving the interference problem is a sine qua non for BPL -- BPL won't exist/survive unless that fundamental problem is solved and standardized soon. Other critical issues for the future of BPL include construction/safety standards, and reliability issues. It was often mentioned that employees working on BPL equipment attached to high-voltage power lines really don't want to get hit with a 20,000-volt shock, for some reason :=)). And reliability of BPL is, of course, related to the reliability of the power system itself. For example, if the power system is disrupted because a tree falls on the power line and breaks it, BPL won't be available to either provide its usual service to customers, or to notify the power company of the location of the outage problem.
The suggestion made by Victor Dominguez (and others) that IEEE should create a Study Group to address the BPL issues was acted upon. Representatives from ETSI (Victor Dominguez), IEEE's Power Engineering Society (PES) (John Newbury), IEEE's Communications Society (Alex Gellman), and the Home Plug Alliance (Oleg Logvinov) agreed to lead that Study Group. Their first meeting will be in Piscataway NJ on 20 adn 21 July. ANYBODY IN CCIP (or anyother IEEEers you may know) interested in participating? My best suggestion for contacting somebody is to reach Victor Dominguez at victor.dominguez@ds2.es. His phone number (in Spain) is + 34 96 136 60 04; cellphone + 34 609 643 275; fax + 34 96 136 62 50.
I hope somebody from CCIP -- or somebody who can at least report back to CCIP -- can participate and bring back the results/progress to CCIP, so we can incorporate those results into any future comments or Position Statements regarding BPL. My bottom line: I'm encouraged that folks at that meeting do see the needs for solving the problem-set for BPL, AND there seem to be at least some potential mechanisms for addressing such problems. I did ask the following question of a few of the folks there: If broadband over fiber and wireless essentially takes over providing broadband to homes and businesses, will BPL still be used? The uniform answer was yes -- the power companies alone will use it for system monitoring and control, for reading power meters, and for other uses.

Robert Powers
rpowers3@earthlink.net