Needless to say that low voltage powerlines, unlike fiber-optics or other types of wired communication solutions, are quite a harsh communication network, where different CE noncompliant equipment creates disturbances and thus prevents reliable communication. The sources of noise range from powerful equipment such as water pumps to LED light bulbs, power adapters and dimmers and emit disturbances in both CENELEC A and FCC frequency bands.
Despite the fact that since quite a few years utilities and vendors use 3rd generation PLC communications, like PRIME and G3-PLC, and those definitely possess mechanisms and features superseding FSK and S-FSK by a seriously larger range of frequency carriers in different bands, as well as much higher communication speed that might help transfer all data collected for one or few days during just one small time slot of clean network, noises continue to represent a big challenge to companies that have chosen PLC as main communication carrier.
This challenge is certainly solvable, however requires substantial clean-up effort and respective costs allocated to
Based on our own examples as well as on similar experience from other large utilities in France, Austria, Spain and other EU countries, at the stage of project deployment around 90-95% of meters are registered and start communicating immediately. The more one tends to increase the KPI close to 100% registration and data collection rate, the higher is the effort and cost for clean-up. Some of the utilities have internal dedicated teams for this job, some use outsourcing of the companies with experience in domain. There are even cases when KPI is responsibility of the bidder, where he needs to perform clean-up in order to keep KPI at requested level for contract duration and respectively to include in its offer such labor and equipment costs.
It is also worth mentioning that due to dynamic nature of noises (appearance of new consumers and new CE non-compliant equipment) the necessity for periodic clean-up might be present for the whole duration of the project.
With the appearance of Hybrid G3-PLC the clean-up effort has been substantially decreased due to back-up RF channel and the ability of each communication node in the network to switch from PLC and RF and vice versa depending on communication success rate over one or the other channel.
On a medium-scale deployment in Russia with more than 30 000 meters installed statistics shows that minimum 98% of meters are being registered immediately and communicate on a permanent basis, while only 2% are left for clean-up.
«Field experience with large G3-PLC Hybrid deployment in a harsh grid in Russia»
The examples from the pilot projects with Hybrid G3-PLC deployed by ADD GRUP in Palestine and Jordan show even better results: 100% communication success without any clean-up effort. This is the true plug-and-play concept.
«6000 smart meters with Hybrid solution for Palestine»
On large scale deployments such effortless KPI levels can save millions of EURO investments for clean-up to utility companies. Considering backward compatibility of Hybrid with pure G3-PLC such can as well be efficiently used for enlargement or maintenance of existing projects.
