DMC International reserves the right to make any modificatiosn to the technical specifications, products, or service offerings at any time and without prior notice, The facts provided herein are for information purposes only and are not warranties, or implications of product performance.

Copyright © 2000-2009, DMC International, All Rights reserved

Utility Solutions

Utilities have long sought to find ways to reduce costs associated with meter data collection. In the early 1980s, hand-held meter reading devices were deployed to replace manual recording of meter information. Like UPC bar codes and scanners, hand-held meter readers reduced the recording time and more importantly, reduced transcription errors. Ten years later, wireless transceivers were being fitted into meters and fixed wireless infrastructure was built to allow metering data to be brought directly into billing systems thus eliminating the need for manual or drive-by meter scanning. For utilities that serve areas with high consumer densities, costs are easily justified to install fixed wireless AMR technologies. Utilities may have very low consumer densities and cannot justify the deployment of wireless AMR communications equipment to adequately cover their service territories. Fortunately, there are AMR technologies more suited to the utility. Power Line Carrier (PLC) is the most practical communications technology for serving areas with low and high consumer density. PLC takes advantage of the utility’s existing power lines to transmit and receive data, eliminating communications wiring or wireless infrastructure. PLC has been used since the 1930s (called Ripple Signal Carrier) for load control and switching. Modern PLC differs in several important ways: it’s faster, supports two-way communications and it’s more reliable. The old ripple systems could transmit only a few bits per second. Some forms of PLC were even slower and only transmit a few bits per hour! PLC signaling technologies can be grouped into two categories: low bandwidth and high bandwidth. DMC’s High bandwidth is in the realm of Access BPL and today is used to provide broadband Internet access at frequencies between 2 MHz and 80 MHz