May 18, 2009 -- The IEEE Standards Association announced that the IEEE P1901 working group, in its March meeting, completed a preliminary version of the draft standard it is developing, IEEE P1901, "Standard for Broadband over Power Line Networks: Medium Access Control and Physical Layer Specifications."
According to IEEE, 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 (<1500 m to the premise) to broadband services as well as BPL devices used in buildings for LANs and other data distribution (<100 m between devices).
At the meeting, the working group's technical sub groups presented unified texts for the first four chapters of the draft standard, which were 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.
The IEEE P1901 is a corporate standards working group created by 20 companies in June 2005. The working group currently has a membership of over 30 entities, representing information technology communications companies, consumer electronic companies, telecommunications companies, utilities, semiconductor manufacturers academia and consortia. For more information on IEEE P1901 and its membership, see: http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/1901/.
The draft standard will continue to be developed over the next several months. The working group next meets May 18 - 22 May in Las Vegas, NV.
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http://standards.ieee.org