The research being undertaken by Alejandro Gutierrez as part of his master in philosophy (M-Phil) degree holds promise of reducing the cost of installing telephone systems within offices by eliminating the need to run independent phone wires.

Gutierrez is being supervised by three faculty members: Dr. Victor Watt, head of the school of engineering and head of the microelectronics and energy management research group; Dr. Audley Darmand of Utech; and Dr. Lucien Ngalamou of the University of the West Indies.

Watt said that the telephone research was one of several being conducted in the faculty of engineering and computing.  Current telephone systems in offices utilise a switchboard called private automatic branch exchange (PABX) which directly controls the entire communication system within the building.

Ringing and caller identification signals, voltage setting for the phone sets, among other important parameters are transmitted using twisted pair cables.

But according to Watt, the research being carried out "augments the existing power lines cable and utilises them as the communication medium".  This eliminates the need for installing additional infrastructure within the building.

"Instead of using the regular phone lines with all these different phone connections, you just plug a specially designed phone in your power line so you'll have a local area network," Watt explains.  "The design concept demonstrates that this approach renders this telecommunication system more cost effective than the currently existing system, due to its minimal infrastructural requirements and its use of available transmit and receive handset equipment," he added.

Watt cautioned however, that the technology was not yet at a stage where it could be used as a replacement for national communication.  "It could be used for a local area network (LAN) initially," he said, pointing out that it would be ideal for small companies and business.  However one major obstacle that needs to be overcome before the technology can have commercial value is noise: Power lines are noisy when transmitting high frequency signals.

"Modern, powerful and resistant communication schemes are needed to counter the problem," said Watt.  The research paper, presented by Gutierrez proposes the use of multi carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) as the "ideal transmission scheme to use in power line communication".

The research group has not yet arrived at a costing for the technology, but Watt believes the specially designed units will only cost a few hundred dollars when in production.

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/magazines/Business/html/20060218T170000-0500_98984_OBS_UTECH_RESEARCHES_USE_OF_POWER_LINES_FOR_PHONES_.asp