With a service territory based in South Dakota and Western Minnesota, East River Electric (ERE) delivers wholesale power to 25 member cooperatives across 63 counties. ERE’s legacy system was nearing end of life and relied upon unlicensed spectrum that could no longer support the level of availability required for their mission critical SCADA.
The challenge
Operating across a service area with 3,300 miles of transmission lines and 262 substations, the requirement to provide a resilient, secure communications backbone was paramount. Not only had the utility found that interference in the unlicensed band was impacting the reliability of their communications but growing bandwidth needs for substation communication meant their existing system was no longer fit for purpose.
“With our legacy network reaching end-of-life and our bandwidth requirements increasing, we needed to find a solution that would bring greater throughput and would give us increased availability for our critical SCADA,” said Paul Lambert, Telecom Projects Coordinator, at East River Electric.
Aiming to both boost throughput and network resilience with a licensed 900MHz network, ERE selected Ubiik Mimomax for a high-capacity narrowband solution.
The solution
Having purchased 900 MHz licensed narrowband spectrum, ERE worked with Ubiik Mimomax to design a Field Area Network that optimized their mission critical communications. Incorporating full duplex and the use of MIMO technology, the Tornado X radios deployed allowed ERE to maximize their investment in spectrum and create a highly reliable network with up to five 9’s availability.
“We had the challenge of managing growing subsets of data for SCADA and load management from our system combined with our members’ Advanced Meter Readings and our own member revenue billing,” said Lambert. “The FAN designed by Ubiik Mimomax allowed us to segregate and prioritize different flows of traffic including Member traffic and end-to-end serial.”
The sectorized design of the Ubiik Mimomax network allows for optimal frequency reuse across the network and the ability to rework the frequency allocation to avoid self-interference. Furthermore, with the sites from the legacy system being ideally situated, the Tornado X network was able to reuse existing infrastructure, thereby saving costs during deployment.
The Result
First phases of the five-year Tornado X network deployment are complete, with an additional 21 tri-sector base stations and an additional 100 remote radios planned to complete the Field Area Network. Deploying only during the warmer months between April to November, the utility has been able to ensure a very high integrity of their antenna installations.
With up to four members connecting to each base station, a careful cutover plan has also been required to minimize downtime. “Since we are using the same frequency band for the new network, we have been able to utilize the new MIMO antennas on the legacy iNET-II radios by using only the vertical port of the antenna until cutover,” said Lambert. “We anticipate one to two days of downtime for each base station cutover, so the challenge has been in coordinating with members given they use the system for their metering.”
As the utility moves into the middle phase of their system deployment, they are already benefitting from the resilience boost they are seeking with the new system. In addition, having purchased more spectrum than was currently required, ERE now has the potential to reallocate spare channels in future as their members’ data requirements increase.
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