  Newly available standards for broadband access using Digital Subscriber Lines
(DSL) have a high degree of spectrum overlap with home networking technologies
using broadband Power Line Communications (BB-PLC) and this overlap leads to
Electromagnetic Compatibility issues that may cause performance degradation in
DSL systems. This paper studies the characteristics of measured PLC-to-DSL
interference and presents novel results on its statistical characterization.
The frequency-dependent couplings between power line cables and twisted-pairs
are estimated from measurements and a statistical model based on a mixture of
two truncated Gaussian distributions is set forth. The proposed statistical
model allows the accurate evaluation of the impact of BB-PLC interference on
various DSL technologies, in terms of both average and worst-case impacts on
data rate. This paper further provides an extensive assessment of the impact of
PLC-to-DSL interference at various loop lengths and for multiple profiles of
Very-high rate Digital Subscriber Lines (VDSL2), Vectored VDSL2 (V-VDSL2), and
G.fast. The results of this paper confirm that the impact of PLC interference
varies with loop length and whether vectoring is used or not. Furthermore, the
average impact is found to be generally small but worst-case couplings can lead
to substantial degradation of DSL.
