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August 20, 2010

Alcatel Lucent and Texas Energy Network are planning to demonstrate that LTE technology is well suited for the energy industry's communications networks.

The showcase is scheduled for next week. Set for oil and gas communications in the state of New Mexico, the week-long demonstration will test network latency and speed across a variety of wireless devices, including telemetry sensors and laptops, said Amit Patel, Alcatel Lucent's CTO leader for Strategic Accounts.

Alcatel-Lucent will use its LTE technology 'On Wheels' facility to show how video monitoring a pipeline in the field can be transmitted back to a central office anywhere on the globe.

“Thanks to the hard work of the Alcatel team and our partners, we are taking the first important step to providing data communications to the energy industry at huge savings and greater efficiency over what they have today,” said Texas Energy Network (TEN) CEO Gregory Casey in a prepared statement.

“If we have our way, our actions will usher in a new era of increased communications performance, leveraging new industry standards and technology to lower costs. TEN has the unique advantage of a game-changing technology and an aggressive customer oriented business plan," added Casey.

The week-long demonstration will use the 700 MHz frequency to test coverage range, throughput speeds and latency. Unlike commercial operator demonstrations, however, the focus of this demo will include uplink speeds because in the utility industry a lot of traffic occurs in the field and is sent back to a central site. Hardened antennas will also be added to wireless devices to double the distance the LTE protocol can cover.

“On average, Wi-MAX is the default technology because LTE is still so new, but we expect that to change,” Casey said.

"Communications networks today for the energy industry are quite compatible to commercial operators' needs," said Mark Madden, Alcatel-Lucent's vice president for energy markets.

But the energy sector tends to have higher reliability requirements than commercial wireless carriers. It may not be a big deal if a smart-meter reading application misses one reading one day, but a breaker on a utility line has to be able to trip within one or two milliseconds or less.

While telemetry applications are much more predictable than consumers' data demands, the network has to be designed for peak usage, regardless of how few times that actually occurs, Madden said. “It's less about cost and more about performance and delivery.”

With the expected explosion of wireless data devices on networks, power companies could end up with communications networks equal in size to some regional service providers. Utility companies likely will find a variety of ways to deploy new communications systems. Some will own their networks while others are likely to partner with commercial wireless operators that are deploying LTE technology.

Oil and gas operations often are located in rural areas, where it could be too expensive to build a commercial wireless network that few people would use. In cases like that, a shared network would make sense.

For example, Canada has set aside 30 megahertz of spectrum in the 1.8 GHz band for power companies and utilities. Now the industry would like the same so the networks could be harmonized.

As part of the FCC's mandate to develop a national broadband plan, the agency in mid 2009 issued a Notice of Inquiry about how smart-grid applications could advance the nation's energy independence. The U.S. federal agency is asking which private & public networks and technologies are best suited to be used for smart-grid applications, with an eye toward the bandwidth, network latency, reliability and coverage requirements for various smart-grid applications.

The FCC is also seeking comment on the costs and benefits of existing smart-grid deployments, and whether existing commercial communications networks are adequate for mission-critical applications like smart-grid monitoring and overall management.

The FCC initiative could actually pit the utilities industry, which is on the record as wanting its own spectrum in the 1.8 GHz band, against commercial wireless carriers, which traditionally have been reluctant to encourage other entities to gain access to spectrum, especially without going through an auction process.

Additionally, commercial wireless carriers maintain that many smart-grid applications can be deployed using their existing wireline and wireless technology. As such, it is likely a mix of wired and wireless and private and public communications networks that would be used to develop smart-grid applications, something that would certainly please Alcatel Lucent and a few others.

As a whole, the oil and gas industry share many similarities with power and hydro companies. Their communications networks need to be fast, ultra reliable and very efficient, 24/7/365. And what better way than to make their networks wireless.

Alcatel Lucent already has some experience servicing power companies in Europe and now intends to duplicate that experience to the North American oil and gas industry using its LTE technology.

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Source: Alcatel Lucent.