Monitoring of electrical grid infrastructure is a critical task carried out continuously by system operators to guarantee safe and reliable operations. Traditional SCADA systems give operators a view of the system's operating conditions with a typical latency in the range of seconds and minutes. The relative low measurement frequency and low speed communications combined with the time required to execute analysis programs have not allowed traditional SCADA systems to handle system emergency operations in real time. The faster and higher resolution measurements introduced with synchrophasor technologies, also known as dynamic monitoring capabilities, enable wide area monitoring at the system level based on accurate and precise data at high-speed data rates with extremely low latency, less than 200ms. When applied to wide area applications, synchrophasors enable operators to optimize system availability, reliability and stability analysis and operations. Phasor Data Concentrators (PDCs) and the Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), that supply control centers with phasor data, are key components of synchrophasor based wide area monitoring systems.