The Universal Powerline Association to Endorse the OPERA Specification and to Launch a Digital Home Industry Standardization Process

10 Mar 2005

10th March 2005 - Hanover, Germany - At a meeting of its Board of Directors held in Hanover during CeBIT, the UPA decided to endorse the OPERA specification and to launch a digital home industry standardization process.

The UPA has reached agreement on the process for the preparation of the specification for a Digital Home Standard (DHS) and invites all interested parties to participate in the process. The DHS specification due in Q2 2006 will be used to design integrated circuits for voice, video and data distribution including multi-stream entertainment such as HDTV; SDTV; and Triple Play services.

As an organization powered by open communication, UPA has agreed to submit a draft of its in-home specification to industry technology leaders and customers for valuable input.

At present, pre-standard units are available as well as UPA pre-standard field data. Industry leaders are currently involved in the process of creating the digital future of powerline networks, and influencing the standard to best suit market needs. The whole process is organized by the UPA's Digital Home standardization committee.

To participate in the digital home standardization process, please contact: peter.sobotka@corinex.com, Chairman of the Digital Home Standardization Committee. The UPA is inviting all In Home networking and Consumer Electronics vendors, interested utilities and telecommunication companies to join its Committees by contacting hirotsu.kenichi@sei.co.jp (Chairman of the co-existence Committee) and donald.pollock@upaplc.org (Universal Access Standard).

The endorsement of the OPERA specifications is fully consistent with the targets of the Association:

• The UPA is aiming at the shortest time to market. Moving on with a broadly recognized efficiency, the OPERA project has already announced a specification. By endorsing this specification, the UPA benefits from the outcome of a successful, rigorous and completed process that included a call for proposals, independent selection and test of state of the art PLC technology.
• The OPERA project is a market driven initiative including 36 companies, 10 leading utilities and ISPs among its membership. Among them are Iberdrola, EDF, Endesa, ENEL, ONI, Linz and MVV who have been leading the most significant PLC deployments in Europe since 2001.
• The OPERA selection process chose a proven technology as its baseline: the selected 200 Mbps PHY and MAC developed by chip Supplier Design of Systems on Silicon (DS2) has already been successfully deployed in the field.
• The UPA aims to ensure co-existence/interoperability of it DHS (Digital Home Standard) with the OPERA Access-BPL Standard.

The UPA Access Standardization Committee will validate the application of the OPERA baseline on the American and Asian markets with leading telecommunication players and will provide feedback and input to OPERA for a worldwide and universal industry standard. The UPA will support OPERA initiative to promote the Access-BPL standard in ETSI and IEEE with the support of the whole Industry; the same will be done with its DHS standard.

“Following the launch in January of an ambitious initiative to issue a coexistence standard between inhome technologies and universal access technologies that will be ready in May 2005, I am satisfied with the current momentum which testifies to the fact that the UPA is the most reliable and market focused standardization association for PLC” said Eric Morel, Chairman of the UPA. He added: “All UPA industry standards and associated certification will be openly and freely available and the UPA will develop for its members an industry label assuring them to provide their customers with a proven expected level of functionality and quality, harmonized with standards and regulations.”

Filed: Mar 2005, BPL, Powerline Networking, Press, Co: DS2, OPERA, UPA, Tech: OPERA 200 Mbps