Phasor based Wide Area Monitoring and Control (WAMC) Systems are becoming a reality with increased research, development and deployments. Many potential control applications based on these systems are being proposed and researched. Such applications are either local applications using data from one or a few PMUs or centralized utilizing data from several PMUs. An aspect of these systems which is less well researched is the WAMC system's dependence on high performance communication systems. To understand the performance and scalability requirements for such systems, a survey on communications and technical requirements for applications based on Phasor Measurement Units (PMU) has been performed. The survey was carried out in the Nordic Region with participants from Transmission System Operators (TSOs) and researchers. The survey focused on documenting the state of art that TSOs and researchers are in, as well as, their plans and visions for the future. This includes planned PMU deployments and prioritization of PMU based applications, a brief summary of this survey is described in this paper. Furthermore, the paper also summaries work in which WAMC communication networks were modeled and simulated. Two basic paradigms were captured in these models: Shared communication and dedicated communication. In the shared communication the WAMC system operated on wide area network that is also utilized for other devices such as RTUs, as well as other possible network uses. In the dedicated model it was assumed that the network was only used for PMU data. 4 scenarios were implemented and simulated. These scenarios represented parameters such as bandwidth capacity or channel capacity variation as well as variations in overall network traffic. Various End to End (ETE) Delay values were collected. A further study focused on analyzing the impact of the PDC configurations on the overall End to End (ETE) delay and measurement quality specifically in terms of measurement data loss or completeness. These studies were done by varying the delays of PMU traffic in the network as well as the amount of time that the PDC would wait for measurements belonging to a specific timestamp arrived from all PMUs in the network. In the paper, a set of parameters that impact the overall performance, including transmission delays as well as delays depending on system architecture and use of PDC within WAMC systems are outlined. These parameters were modeled and simulated and the results compared to the finding from the PMU application survey conducted earlier.