Statistical evaluation of 55 million PLC channel and topology measurements by more than 75.000 end-users

This paper presents statistical information about the company´s field data. First of all, a monitoring tool is presented which offers the opportunity to collect reports. These reports are periodically sent by each PLC device and collected in a central database. They show the network topology and provide information concerning the channel characteristic such as the signal to noise ratio (SNR), the SNR variation within the line cycle or the variation during a day, just to name some of them. These presented analyses contain data of the customer´s bandwidth requirement and their need for new technologies. A PLC channel emulator is fed with all the above mentioned data and can be used to improve constantly the quality of the company´s products - as well as for research and development of new product features such as adaptive transmit power management (ATPM) presented in [6] or MIMO-PLC. Up to now, there are PLC devices with a performance of 14 Mbps, 85 Mbps and 200 Mbps, and a recently released 500 Mbps product. The analysis shows the market demand of easy-to-use products with a high data rate for in-home networking. This is perfectly fulfilled by power-line devices.