History of Power Line Communications
Power Line Communications (PLC) has existed for more than 50 years in a rudimentary form. Low Speed Narrow Band PLC has been used for sending signals along the power lines for switching peak loads on and off. Overhead High Voltage transmission lines have been used for signalling and voice communications but at very low bandwidths.
Automatic meter reading and street lighting systems are used in some countries on a small scale. Within buildings, systems have been available for controlling lighting, and carrying out simple switching using a proposed standard known as X10.
A Low Speed Narrow Band PLC standard has been mandated by CENELEC (EN 50065-1) delivering a data rate less than 500 kbps in the 148.5 kHz frequency band in Europe, and recognised globally, except in Japan where the frequencies below 450kHz.
In environments where modern telephony and broadband internet access services are required, maximum bandwidths of 500kbps are inadequate because the real capacity is reduced by interference caused by appliances connected to the domestic supply. Hence it is necessary to use a modulation scheme that has a very high signal to noise ratio at extremely low injection levels.
Since InovaTech was founded in 1999, it has moved from a 14Mbps offering to its current 200Mbps offering using the industry leading DS2 chipset.