DCI Supplies BPL Management Systems for Broad-Band Commercial Services in Michigan

Tuesday November 6, 8:46 am ET
-- Full Automated Support for Powerline Communications Deployment


VALENCIA, Spain--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Spanish company Dynamic Consulting International (www.dci.es) with headquarters in Madrid (Spain) and the North American company utility.net with its main office in Los Angeles, California (USA) have signed an agreement for which DCI will provide comprehensive BPL management and monitoring software (OMS-PLC) to operate the BPL networks that utility.net will deploy in the USA. This network will offer broadband services to potentially millions of customers in largely rural areas.


The deployment will begin in the state of Michigan, with a network that will provide service to 10.000 homes in and around Grand Ledge, to the west of Lansing, the state’s capital. This initial deployment will be completed in early 2008, and the electric company Consumers Energy, with 1.8 million customers in the State, will assign new areas of service in blocks of 100.000, with the intention of reaching hundreds of thousands of customers in the next 2½ years. The BPL system can also be used by Consumers Energy as an enabler for smart-grid applications such us automatic meter reading (AMR) applications, power line outage notification and distribution network advanced management.

Jorge Blasco, President and CEO of DS2, the powerline chipset provider selected by utility.net stated "this partnership between DS2 and utility.net not only bridges the digital divide in Michigan, it also serves as a model for other regions under served by broadband technologies through out the world. The same BPL technology is used in another commercial service run by IBEC in Alabama and in other US regions. It is initiatives like this one from DCI and utility.net that are changing the history of telecommunications to bring millions of global citizens into the 21st century with a secure and reliable broadband service. By adding BPL management systems to the service the local utility now also has the option to develop smart grid applications, an option that allows for greener more efficient management of electricity and broadband distribution".

BPL networks may consist of millions of devices to be monitored, operated and upgraded. This large number of devices represents a real challenge for a centralized management solution. DCI responded to the challenged by offering its IAP (Intelligent Agent Platform) to monitor the BPL network by inserting an intermediate layer that minimizes the messages between the network element and the OMS-PLC central management system. This is achieved by creating a reduced version of the IAP agent called nano-agent which is embedded in Linux / miniITX cards and deployed at every power substation (more than 200 in the Michigan deployment plan).

In addition, OMS-PLC will provide full automated support to field deployment, including real time reception of the devices identification information and their specific configuration, as well as the service provisioning under the requests of those ISP’s contracting utility.net's access network.

utility.net is a Broadband over Power Line (BPL) turn-key solutions partner committed to bringing high-speed Internet access for data, voice and video-on-demand to homes and offices in unserved and underserved areas in association with their utility and value-added partners. The company also offers its partner utilities BPL-specific services that assist in improving the reliability and safety of the grid, as well as other smart grid applications. (www.utility.net)

Dynamic Consulting International Telecommunications Spain is a specialist in delivering comprehensive, flexible and affordable network management solutions. The use of IAP platform reduces significantly the development time and increase the quality of the delivered solutions (www.dci.es).