The debate on what technologies and standards should be used as the foundation for the future Smart Grid is heating up. Multiple vendors and industry organizations are pushing their own (often incompatible) views of the Smart Grid. Even if we focus only in the area of communications standards for Smart Grid, we find different options being proposed: high-speed and low-speed powerline technology, IEEE 802.15.4, cellular networks, WiMAX and many others.

Smart Grid networks will be hybrid networks

Although at DS2 we think that high-speed powerline networking technology is the best positioned to deliver a scalable platform for SmartGrid, other technologies also provide benefits in specific scenarios (for example, in cases where a utility wants to manage water or gas meters that don’t have a power connection), so many utilities may need to use a combination of multiple technologies to build their Smart Grid.

Unified IP-based management systems for Smart Grid

There is an easy solution to the problem of managing systems based on incompatible technologies: TCP/IP. The TCP/IP protocol suite has demonstrated that it indeed solves the problem of providing a common communication protocol for disparate PHY/MAC technologies. Today, millions of people connect to the internet using a large variety of PHY/MAC technologies: Ethernet, Wi-Fi, powerline, DSL, cable-modem, 3G cell phones and many more.

Unless Smart Grid technology is based on open TCP/IP standards, the fragmentation of multiple PHY/MAC technologies (and their associated management protocols) will hinder significantly the growth of the Smart Grid industry.

More here.