GENEVA-Russia’s Gazprom, the world’s largest supplier of natural gas, is completing the final stages of a $100 million trunked radio network built to service gas drilling towns located in one of the most remote and inhospitable regions on the planet.
Covering an area of more than 150,000 square kilometers in far northern Siberia, the MPT 1327-based network spans five time zones and represents the largest-ever trunked radio installation. When fully operational, it will provide communications among Gazprom’s Moscow headquarters, the company’s operational headquarters in Nidym on the Central Siberian Plateau, and about 30 gas drilling towns dotted across a desolate plain that is home to the world’s largest supplies of fossil fuels.
The new trunked radio system already is providing the first reliable communications links among many of the company’s drilling installations, which are too isolated to be serviced by either fixed-line or cellular networks.
According to Victor Chupikin, deputy head of telecommunications for Gazprom, the network also will serve as an important element of Gazprom’s $12 billion program to repair 15,000 kilometers of gas pipeline that carry gas to Western Europe and the southern Commonwealth of Independent States across some of the world’s most inaccessible terrain.
“The robust nature of the trunked radio network assures uninterrupted connection with dispatch teams and the mobile teams of workers whose jobs it is to provide on-the-ground maintenance of our pipelines,” he said.
The network was supplied by Marconi Mobile Networks, the Florence, Italy-based arm of U.K. telecom giant Marconi Communications.
According to Mauro de Lauri, marketing manager for Marconi Mobile Networks, designing and installing the network presented some complex and unusual problems. “Gazprom’s paramount concern was reliability,” he said. “This meant building in a high level of redundancy, while at the same time trying to keep costs down,” he said.
With this in mind, the trunked network is designed around a five-layered architecture comprising two national control centers, 30 primary master control centers, more than 100 regional control centers and some 300 base stations.
The Nidym center and the company’s backup control center in Moscow are both equipped with high-end switches that manage up to 1,000 individual radio channels, allowing each section of the network to support around 500 simultaneous calls.
De Lauri said his company also had to redesign much of the network equipment to cope with the rigors of life on the Siberian plain.
According to the Gazprom specification, the new system not only had to deliver full functionality at -350
