Migs Mobile Network

When PLDT and San Miguel Corporation (SMC) was able to secure a board membership at Meralco, It never entered my mind that they would be needing the electric company for their “tech needs”.

To give you a glimpse of what you’ll be able to read in this post… Imagine one day, you plug your computer  in the electric outlet and you don’t only get power but also Broadband internet access.

That’s how PLDT and SMC plan to “use” (sorry for the term) Meralco. They would be using Meralco’s infrastructure – specifically their electric posts – to deploy what is called Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) through Power Line Connection (PLC). I must admit, BPL and PLC are new terms to me though the technology has been here years ago. And it is only now that I understand what it is, how it works, and how I will be able to use it.

In a very brief explanation, Power line Connection enables electric or power lines to carry data – something like transforming your power cords into a LAN Cable and your electric outlets as LAN outlets. For more info about PLC, see the PLC Wikipedia page here. Broadband over Power Lines uses the PLC system but in wider scope.

Broadband over power lines (BPL), also known as power-line Internet or powerband, is the use of PLC technology to provide broadband Internet access through ordinary power lines. A computer (or any other device) would need only to plug a BPL “modem” into any outlet in an equipped building to have high-speed Internet access

How stuff works has provided a great explanation on BPL:

The power flowing down high-voltage lines is between 155,000 to 765,000 volts. That amount of power is unsuitable for data transmission. It’s too “noisy.”

As stated before, both electricity and the RF used to transmit data vibrate at certain frequencies. In order for data to transmit cleanly from point to point, it must have a dedicated band of the radio spectrum at which to vibrate without interference from other sources.

Hundreds of thousands of volts of electricity don’t vibrate at a consistent frequency. That amount of power jumps all over the spectrum. As it spikes and hums along, it creates all kinds of interference. If it spikes at a frequency that is the same as the RF used to transmit data, then it will cancel out that signal and the data transmission will be dropped or damaged en route.

BPL bypasses this problem by avoiding high-voltage power lines all together. The system drops the data off of traditional fiber-optic lines downstream, onto the much more manageable 7,200 volts of medium-voltage power lines.

Once dropped on the medium-voltage lines, the data can only travel so far before it degrades. To counter this, special devices are installed on the lines to act as repeaters. The repeaters take in the data and repeat it in a new transmission, amplifying it for the next leg of the journey.In Current Communications Group’s model of BPL, two other devices ride power poles to distribute Internet traffic. The CT Coupler allows the data on the line to bypass transformers.

The transformer’s job is to reduce the 7,200 volts down to the 240-volt standard that makes up normal household electrical service. There is no way for low-power data signals to pass through a transformer, so you need a coupler to provide a data path around the transformer. With the coupler, data can move easily from the 7,200-volt line to the 240-volt line and into the house without any degradation.

Some companies carry the signal in with the electricity on the power line, while others put wireless links on the poles and send the data wirelessly into homes. The signal is received by a powerline modem that plugs into the wall. The modem sends the signal to your computer.

I haven’t seen a wireless BPL modem yet but for sure there’s one out there. So that you can just plug the BPL modem and it will act as a home network – something like wi-fi.

There, now we know what PLC and BPL is. On the next post, we will take a look at where BPL globaly and here in the Philippines.