In the race to establish standards for broadband over powerline technology, Opera—the Open PLC European Research Alliance—has announced the finalization of the first open global specification for BPL.

Meanwhile, other standard processes—the Homeplug Alliance, the Consumer Electronic Powerline Communications Alliance and Universal Powerline Alliance—continue to work on their own specifications.

The Opera board says it will now take the specification to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the IEEE in hopes of seeing it be adopted as a standard. The IEEE launched its own project, P1901, in June 2005 and is in the position to recommend one of the other protocols to enable the BPL industry—known as powerline communication or PLC in Europe—to create a global standard for both interoperability and economies of scale.

Because BPL technology rides the public power grid, regulators in each country ultimately will have the final say on how the technology is used.

The Opera specification, which was launched by the European Commission and is backed by the Universal Powerline Association—a group of BPL equipment vendors—was two years in the making and was developed by a consortium of industry specialists from 37 companies and 10 universities, according to Opera. The hope is that this standard can gain widespread acceptance in the U.S., said Chano Gomez, vice president of technology and strategic partnerships for semiconductor supplier DS2, a member of Opera and of the UPA.

Gomez believes the Opera standard has merit because it has been field tested by multiple European power companies with very different power grids.

“This is not just a paper specification, it has been validated by field trials,” he said. “The distribution grid is very different in Italy from what it is in Spain.”

Developing a standard will encourage more companies to explore BPL deployment, especially smaller companies, he said.

“We especially think it will have an impact with smaller power companies, which have been a little conservative and weren’t sure whether it was the right moment to go with BPL,” Gomez said. “We would expect to see companies going from small technical trials to broad-scale deployments.”

The Opera specification defines a PHY, or physical layer, and a MAC, or media access control specification, for BPL access networks and a complementary system specification. In addition, the new spec allows for interoperability for non-Opera technologies by means of a co-existence mechanism. Opera supports say this is a unique feature that also guarantees that future versions of Opera technology will be compatible with what’s deployed today, making it easier for service providers to deploy now with confidence. Today’s specifications are smoothing the way for investment in the technology.