Category: News

Brussels, September 2021

EUTC congratulates Members WPD (Virtual Access) and Nokia and Partner JRC on a new LTE project to develop learning on:

• – Confirmation that LTE is a suitable solution for providing communications for the energy industry 
• – Confirmation regarding using an Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) or Time Division Duplex (TDD) system 
• – Confirmation on bandwidth requirements 
• – Confirmation on types of data that can be passed over an LTE system 
• – Confirmation on antenna solutions for different situations 
• – Confirmation on training requirements and test equipment for staff

This project is the UK’s first multi-site, multi-vendor LTE trial designed to mimic on a small scale, and develop proposals for, the roll-out of a telecommunications network to support Active Management functionality. This is an important follow up to the a single vendor; single base station LTE evaluation trial at Portishead which provided data on the fundamental design and capabilities of LTE and illustrated how such a communications network might be integrated into WPD infrastructure. This showed that an LTE network is better equipped than a traditional narrow-band Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) network in the harsh environment [e.g. electrically noisy sites, RF interference, multipath etc.] to be found in the context of an energy network and that the likely data throughput would be as predicted.

The project comes to the end at the end of June. During the month of June , updates to firmware of all 15 Encore Customer Premises Equipment (CPE’s) to the latest release was carried out which provides additional security features as a result of PEN testing conducted in Sweden. 

See more here.

European Utilities Telecom Council (EUTC) Aisbl is a non-profit organization delivering education, collaboration, best practices and thought leadership in telecommunication technology to utilities, other critical infrastructure providers and regulators, ensuring efficient, secure, sustainable and affordable smart infrastructure solutions. Moreover, the EUTC is the trusted advisor, source and resource of information and knowledge for its members and relevant policy makers regarding telecommunication technologies required by utilities and other critical infrastructure providers.

As next generation networks (such as 4G, 5G, LoRa and Sigfox) become more widespread, there is increasing interest from the utilities sector in the features in the standards that are targeted at IoT telemetry-type applications. New bearers can open up exciting new applications that cannot be served by today’s narrowband bearers. For 5G, ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLC), network slicing and support for large densities of connected devices are some of the attractions.

A new white paper from TCCA’s SCADA, Smartgrid and IoT Working Group looks at the considerations for utilities looking to transition from narrowband to next-generation bearers. The paper recommends the top ten topics that should be taken into account by utilities planning to migrate their machine-to-machine (M2M) communications to a new bearer or bearers.

“There is a perception that moving to a new technology bearer is a necessary upgrade that will deliver a faster service,” said Nick Smye from Mason Advisory, who chairs the Working Group. “However, for M2M communications, mission critical capability isn’t simply about speed. Risk of obsolescence, network resilience, priority and pre-emption are all critical features for mission critical utility applications. It will be some time before 5G networks provide the required level of resilience and coverage, and, for example, any bearer needs to support priority and pre-emption, which is a key feature of TETRA.”

The considerations are ranked in order of importance, and reflect a utility sector view, as well as a European perspective in terms of the availability and reliability of communications infrastructure.

Read the white paper here.

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About TCCA

On behalf of its members, TCCA represents all standard mobile critical communications technologies and complementary applications. Its members are drawn from end users, operators and industry across the globe. It believes in and promote the principle of open and competitive markets worldwide through the use of open standards and harmonised spectrum. It drives the development of common global mobile standards for critical broadband and maintain and enhance the TETRA Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) standard. TCCA is the 3GPP Market Representation Partner for critical communications and our members actively contribute in 3GPP working groups.  TCCA supports the  ETSI MCX Plugtests™, is a member of the MCS-TaaSting project, and supports the Mission Critical Open Platform (MCOP) project.  To find out more, please visit www.tcca.info and www.critical-communications-world.com

European Utilities Telecom Council (EUTC) Aisbl is a non-profit organization delivering education, collaboration, best practices and thought leadership in telecommunication technology to utilities, other critical infrastructure providers and regulators, ensuring efficient, secure, sustainable and affordable smart infrastructure solutions. Moreover, the EUTC is the trusted advisor, source and resource of information and knowledge for its members and relevant policy makers regarding telecommunication technologies required by utilities and other critical infrastructure providers.