OREANDA-NEWS. Panasonic System Networks Co., Ltd. (PSN), a Panasonic group company, today announced that its HD-PLC1, a Broadband over Powerline Communication (BPL) Technology, has been approved by the NIST2 SGIP3 Catalog of Standards of the United States. The company also announced that it has opened its verification test environment for coexistence to the public.

There are several types of standards based on BPL technologies; however, the instability of communications due to the interference among the different BPL technologies was a serious concern. NIST recognized this as a major issue in the development of the smart grid and dedicated itself to resolving the issue. As the result of its efforts, NIST recently established the "NIST SGIP Catalog of Standards". These guidelines for BPL include the following three specifications which PSN took the lead in promoting their standardization; IEEE 19014, the global standard for BPL, ITU-T G.99725, the global standard for BPL coexistence function, and NIST IR 7862, the guideline of coexistence implementation which requires that the coexistence function be "always-on".

In order to verify the developed PLC products meet NIST SGIP requirements, Panasonic has made its BPL coexistence verification test environment open to the public, and has started the BPL coexistence testing service.