Telecom Lead Asia: The Power Line Communication (PLC) Systems market is expected to reach $7.1 billion by 2018, at a CAGR of 19.3 percent.
For many years, Power Line Communication (PLC) System has been built to communicate low bandwidth analog and digital information over residential, commercial, and high voltage power line.
With the emergence of modern networking technologies including broadband, there is a more than ever need for utility and service providers to discover solutions that are able to deliver the services to the consumers at minimum cost and maximum performance.
With the advent of smart grid and need for substation automation, the potential of power line as a powerful medium to be able to deliver not only electricity or control signals, but even full duplex high speed data and multimedia content are being explored now.
Some of companies involved in PLC market are Echelon (U.S.), Cypress Semiconductor (U.S.), Marvell Technology Group (Bermuda), Maxim Integrated (U.S.), Qualcomm Atheros (U.S.), Texas Instruments (U.S.), etc.
According to MarketsandMarkets, the global PLC system revenue market is expected to grow from $2.94 billion in 2013 to $7.10 billion in 2018 at a CAGR of 19.3 percent.
In terms of revenue, the broadband market is larger than the narrowband market with a split of 60-40 favoring broadband in 2012. The global PLC unit shipment market is expected to grow from 38.90 million units in 2013 to 417.16 million units in 2018 at a CAGR of 60.7 percent. The N-PLC shipment market is larger than that of B-PLC.
PLC is being used in a host of emerging and existing applications, including smart grid, home automation, vehicle automation, broadband over power line, M2M communications, etc. One of the major uses of PLC is in smart grid where it is used in automatic meter reading (AMR) and automatic meter management (AMM), building automation, security, electric vehicle charging, in micro-inverters for alternative sources of energy, temperature and lighting.
The major application of PLC is in smart grid. It is expected to hold around 75 percent of market in 2012. Besides, it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 18.8 percent from 2013 to 2018.
The PLC market is highly geography specific, with Europe leading the pack due to its early acceptance of the PLC technology. U.S. is the biggest market in the Americas and its major revenue is from B-PLC applications like in-home networking and control.
APAC is an emerging market for PLC. China and Japan are the fastest growing regions in APAC, with expected CAGR of 23.0 percent and 22.9 percent respectively from 2013 to 2018.
