Eric Morel, President of UPA, stated that, "The time is now for Powerline organizations worldwide to forget the hype and consider the short and long term needs of customers in all markets. This Memorandum of Understanding and Access proposal is a stepping stone to harmonizing the market for Powerline technologies, products and applications and will further the development of a single standard for high-speed Powerline Communication applications."
Javier Arriola, Coordinator of the OPERA II consortium, added, "OPERA includes 26 partners from 11 different countries committed to the latest high-speed Powerline technology. One of our key targets is to catalyze and finalize the standardization process. For this reason we are delighted to be working with the UPA to deliver standardized technology and product to the market."
In 2005, UPA and OPERA signed a similar joint agreement to promote compliance between the specifications then under development by both organizations. OPERA, a market driven organization with the support of all the major players in the access BPL market developed a global specification for access BPL applications. The specification has been publicly available since 2005. OPERA recently received funding of 9.06 million euros ($12.8M) from the European Commission to support extended field deployments designed to catalyze the deployment of BPL applications including:
- Broadband Internet Access
- E-learning
- VoIP Telephony
- Smart Home
- Video over IP
- Video on demand
- Security
- E-Health
This is by far the largest investment to promote standards based Powerline deployments. OPERA is widely supported by the BPL industry.