G3-PLC Alliance presents the key results of the year

14th October 2013

Nat Bowers

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Two years after formation, G3-PLC Alliance is excited to present the key results of the year. The number of G3-PLC Alliance's members increased strongly, with new representatives from Asia. 44 member companies have joined the G3-PLC Alliance since its launch two years ago. This is a direct result of growing interest from leaders in the smart grid industry and a remarkable increase of G3-PLC field tests and projects.

Utilities are more and more committed to G3-PLC. Asia constitutes a strong promoter for G3-PLC and a potential market as promising as Europe. Due to this strong interest, G3-PLC Alliance organized an Asian grand tour in June 2013 that allowed for educating 200 executives from Japan and China on the G3-PLC features.

G3-PLC ITU G9003 standard - 2013, the year of maturity

The drafting and management of the G3 -PLC specification is tightly coupled with the interoperability testing process, thereby ensuring the specification is truly 'ready for use' by the market.

Over 50 experts from 20 different entities have worked on G3-PLC specifications. All were driven by a common goal: working together toward specifying an internationally recognised G3-PLC communication protocol for smart grid applications. PHY and MAC parts of the specifications are now mature and consist in the version 3 of the standard adopted in May 2013. A new drafted document will be proposed in December 2013 for ITU publication. This last draft will show an extreme degree of convergence for the FCC band, between the G3-PLC Alliance reference version, ITU G9903 and IEEE P1901.2.

G3-PLC Alliance has developed and secured the interoperability processes, tests and tools for the PHY, MAC, and 6Lowpan layers and for the 3 main regulatory world bands. First rounds of tests were passed by Freescale, Maxim Integrated, Renesas, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments for the Cenelec-A band; Maxim Integrated, Renesas, and Texas Instruments also successfully passed the first rounds of tests for the ARIB band. Implementation for the FCC band will be performed at the end of 2013. All the tests have been done on the last ITU G9903 version. Now, all the test procedures are fully operational and open to all the members who want to check the interoperability of their products and their conformity to the ITU standards. Three new implementers have recently passed the tests successfully: Accent, Atmel and Enverv.

G3-PLC will be soon implemented in the industrial projects of major companies in several countries.

Several major players will implement G3-PLC at a very large scale: Enexis for Smart Metering in Netherlands, TEPCO in Japan for the home energy management systems (Route B), and ERDF in France with the Smart Metering Linky project.

This will be the first concrete step of an industrial worldwide development!