Alcatel-Lucent to demo LTE network for oil and gas industry: Working with Texas Energy Network on broadband network

While WiMAX technology is often spoken of as the wireless protocol best suited for smart-grid applications, Alcatel Lucent and Texas Energy Network are planning to demonstrate next week that LTE technology is also well suited for the energy industry’s communications networks.
The week-long demo, set for oil and gas communications in New Mexico, will test latency and speeds across a variety of devices, including telemetry sensors and laptops, said Amit Patel, Alcatel Lucent’s CTO leader for Strategic Accounts. Alcatel-Lucent will use its LTE on Wheels facility to show how video monitoring a pipeline in the the field can be transmitted back to a central office, for example.
Texas Energy Network (TEN) said it plans to deploy LTE technology for a nationwide wireless broadband network, initially targeting the oil and gas industry. “Thanks to the hard work of the TEN team and our partners, we are taking the first important step to providing data communications to the energy industry at a huge savings and greater efficiency over what they have today,” said 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 industry standards and technology to deliver lower costs. TEN has the unique advantage of a game-changing technology and an aggressive customer oriented business plan.”
“In many ways, communications networks for the energy industry are quite compatible” to commercial operators’ needs, said Mark Madden, Alcatel-Lucent’s VP for energy markets, Americas. However, the energy sector tends to have higher reliability requirements than commercial 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 a millisecond.
And 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 delivery.”
The week-long demonstration will use the 700 MHz frequency to test coverage range, throughput speeds and latency, said Patel. Unlike commercial operator demonstrations, however, the focus of this demonstration 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 be added to devices to double or triple the distance the LTE protocol can cover.
“WiMAX is the default technology because LTE is brand new, but we expect that to change,” Madden noted.
With the expected explosion of data devices on networks, utilities could end up with communications networks equal in size to some regional service providers, he added. Utility companies likely will find a variety of ways to deploy new communications systems. Some will own their own networks while other likely will 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 out a commercial wireless network that few people would use. In cases like that, a shared network would make sense.
Government initiatives
As part of the Federal Communications Commission’s mandate to develop a national broadband plan, the FCC in mid 2009 issued a Notice of Inquiry about how smart-grid applications could advance the nation’s energy independence. The FCC is asking which private and public networks and technologies are best suited to be used for smart-grid applications, with an eye toward the bandwidth, 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.
The initiative could 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. Further, commercial wireless carriers maintain many smart-grid applications can be deployed using their existing spectrum. As such, it is likely a mix of wired and wireless and private and public communications networks will be used to develop smart-grid applications.
Canada has set aside 30 megahertz of spectrum in the 1.8 GHz band for utilities and the utilities industry would like the same so the networks could be harmonized.
Madden noted the New Mexico demonstration will only use 10 megahertz of spectrum.