IEEE 1675 was approved in 2008. It provided testing and verification standards for the hardware commonly used for broadband over power line (BPL) installations (primarily couplers and enclosures) and standard installation methods to ensure compliance with applicable codes and standards. Other IEEE standards sponsored by the Power line Communication Standards Committee: : Recommended Practice for Smart Grid Communication Equipment -Test methods and installation requirements : Standard for a Convergent Digital Home Network for Heterogeneous Technologies. : Power Line Communication EMC Working Group. Derived standards The two standards below and their amendments are also written by the same committee. Despite the different bandwidths and frequencies addressed, they are based on similar technologies specialized to their main areas of use. All three include provisions for cryptographic security and authentication. IEEE 1901.1: Mid Frequency (less than 12 MHz) Power Line Communications for Smart Grid Applications. It uses either type of OFDM, can use TDMA or CSMA, and modulates up to 16-QAM. It has provisions for ISP. IEEE 1901.2: Low Frequency (less than 500 kHz) Narrow Band Power Line Communications for Smart Grid Applications. It was authorized in 2010 and approved as standard by October 2012. It supports data rates of up to 500 kbit/s. It only uses FFT OFDM. It supports CSMA or a frequency-notching collision avoidance (FDMA-like), although analyses tend to believe that the CSMA mechanism will be used less often as it requires a preamble to be sent, while FDMA is naturally supported as a part of adaptive tone (frequency) picking. Compared to the other two standards, it has most parts simplified or minified due to the lower speed and more limited scope of use. It modulates up to 16-QAM, supports up to 72 kV grids, and has provisions for sending data across a transformer. It also describes possibility of interoperability with G3-PLC/PRIME CENELEC A. An IETF RFC Draft address the higher layers of the protocol, namely the specifics of passing IPv6 packets over the PHY and MAC layers of PLC systems like IEEE 1901. 6LoWPAN was previously used for this purpose, but it does not match the use case exactly. Availability The IEEE 1901 standards are promoted by trade groups such as the HomePlug Powerline Alliance and the HD-PLC Alliance. Panasonic is a member of the HD-PLC Alliance, and licenses its patents and technologies that support IEEE 1901. MegaChips (former, Kawasaki Microelectronics, also a member) announced a product in 2011.