pose a serious competitive threat to PLT. In addition, PLT's maximum access speed depends on a shared connection, shared by all the users connected to the same local network station, SO the more people simultaneously using the Internet, the lower the obtained speed. PLT technology is still in its early stages, and there was no global technology standard for the use of PLT as a broadband access line in place until early 2006. The Open PLC European Research Alliance (OPERA; www.ist-opera.org), a Euro- pean initiative to develop BPL technologies and specifications, has been busy working on developing such standards. The OPERA group links European univer- sities and companies developing chips and equipment for broadband and utilities. The group suggests that its standard will be the only really open PLT system that ensures full interoperability for broadband access and in-building distribution sys- tems without recourse to proprietary technologies. After two years of development, a consortium of industry specialists from 35 organizations (including 10 universi- ties), supported by the European Commission, developed a specification based on a marketing and functional requirement blueprint ratified by OPERA. In February 2006, OPERA announced the approval of the first open global specification for PLC access, also known as BPL. This specification will accelerate mass rollout of high-speed, low-cost broadband access, voice, and audiovisual services, as well as utility applications for control and management operations. (The specification, together with an "OPERA Technology White Paper," can be freely downloaded from the Project Outputs section of the OPERA Web site.) PLT's interference problem is being addressed by developments that use OFDM. As discussed in Chapter 13, OFDM divides available spectrum into small paths that are overlapped and spaced perpendicular to each other. The greater the overlapping, the more paths can be handled. While each path has a low data rate, together they offer a higher rate and more effici