PLT under the spotlight

Power Line Telecommunication (also known as BPL) was under the spotlight this week at the third Annual High Speed Access Technologies Conference held in Midrand.

Telecoms manager for Johannesburg City power, Teddy Naidoo, addressed the question "Is Broadband over Power Lines still a viable, cost-effective solution considering the state of South Africa's power provision?"

He told delegates that PLT has currently reached such high levels of technological development that the interference problem spoken about over the past few years no longer exists. He said that unfortunately there are still some sceptics that insist that there are problems.

In a presentation entitled: "Examining the pitfalls of PLT in South Africa", Hans van de Groenendaal ZS6AKV put forward the South African Radio League's point of view that any interference to the HF radio spectrum was unacceptable.

He said that the draft regulations currently under review were inadequate to protect the HF spectrum and reviewed some of the SARL's objections to the draft regulation. The draft under consideration is based on the FCC standards, which are continually under attack from the ARRL and other national communication entities in the USA.

He told delegates that the ARRL had recently won a court case in which the FCC was remanded for not following due process when it reviewed the test results on which the BPL regulations were based. He called on suppliers of PLT equipment to open inference testing on PLT equipment to public scrutiny.

The SARL PowerPoint presentation is available on the web at www.sarl.org.za - click on PLC.