Joel Schroeder, Business Development Manager for Inmarsat’s Land Mobile Services, discusses the different communication solutions that utilities will be taking advantage of as they integrate with the smart grid.

Full Transcript:

Joel Schroeder: Inmarsat is a mobile satellite operator. The company has been in business for actually more than thirty years. Its history is actually based in the maritime industry, originally set-up to provide safety in sea communications. Over the past thirty years, though, the company has evolved and developed a strong portfolio on both land and aeronautical services, as well. We’re here today to talk about what we’re doing in the utility sector, in particular. We’ve worked with utilities for quite a long time, traditionally providing solutions from the work force, for disaster recovery, business continuity, more recently with the advent of smart grid, and a big push into automating various layers of the grid. We’ve also started to move into finding a connectivity solution for things like smart metering for distribution automations, sub-station connectivity, working with utilities and some of the other vendors to utilities. We’re providing those platforms that rely on communications to operate. Within the utilities operating, they’re going to have infrastructure located in a number of areas. Some are going to be in fairly urban areas. We’re likely to have existing commercial wireless services that are going to support mobile workforce requirements. It can be anything from the requirement for a service crew to be able to download a work order when they arrive on site to either do maintenance or possibly the construction on a facility. It could be time recording in a workforce. So when that crew starts work, or even reaching back to the headquarters, I guess, to get technical support from engineers, maybe new drawings whether specifications that they need to download in order to complete their work.
Ben Lack: So, you’re really improving customer service and you’re also improving the operations.
Joel Schroeder: Yes, making the utilities more efficient in their operations; eliminating downtime really. In what I understand from talking to some customers is, in the past, you might deploy a crew to a remote site. Get there. Find out if there’s actually some anomaly to the way the infrastructure has been set-up or configured that requires them to get new drawings and new specifications done by an engineer back at headquarters. Sometimes, the work crew would said “I know,” while someone will drive back maybe two or three hours, sit down and spend half a day getting new specs worked out, and come back to that work site. The crew effectively sat there, and he’s effectively been idle for perhaps a day. And automating the workforce, we’ve got the ability to have a real time exchange with that kind of information keeping work crews moving while they’re in the field; making the, as I said, the utilities’ operations more efficient; and eliminating downtime. One of the first problems that we’ve been brought in to help address is connecting smart meters working in more remote locations. If you can see regulatory drivers in a number of states that have pushed utilities to try and cover 100% of their customer’s bases with smart meters. There are a number of locations that they cannot get to with existing commercial networks that they might use to backhaul those meters or backhaul the data off those meters in many locations. So, they’ve looked to satellite as an alternative or as an extension of their network into more remote locations, more effectively offering some of the bigger pipe backhaul half of an AMI concentrator. I’m sure you’re familiar with it. You might have multiple in anything from hundreds to a few thousands meters sitting behind the single concentrator, which is connected to those meters to a local wireless network. We’re essentially sitting on top of that concentrator and providing the backhaul to the utilities’ data center to connect these meters that are sitting remote. I think at these certain stages, primarily about customer service, is giving the utility the ability to provide more accurate billing to customers, and also giving the customers the ability to view their usage in real time in order to help them manage or use and reduce their power cost on a monthly basis. Down the road, it’s going to give the utilities the ability to start reaching into the consumers household and controlling some systems in exchange for lower rates in their power. For example, if you’re a consumer, and you’ve got a pool at home, you might want to offer the utility the ability to schedule when you cycle the pool folder in order to get a lower rate, i.e. the power that you’re using at that time. So, there becomes a control function in the sense that it gives the utility the ability to actually start offering you lower power rates in exchange for a certain amount of control on the systems in your home. This terminal here, this is a BGAN terminal. BGAN: Broadband Global Area Network. It is effectively two networks in one box. You’ve got both the circuit switch network and an IP network. On the circuit switch side, you’ve got a basic voice service and then SMS service. On the IP side, you have a standard IP service, which is a best effort internet connection and a standard IP or a streaming IP service. Streaming IP is effectively a guaranteed bit rate service designed to support applications that require a fixed input, something like video conferencing or video streaming. This is one of the Class One terminals. A Class One gives you the highest capacity– you get the full half megabyte service on the standard IP, you get up to 384 kbps service guarantee on the streaming IP. In this terminal, you’ve also got a Wi-Fi access point; you’ve got the ability to plug-in internet or USB. So, you’ve got this on the large scale. We’ve got what are called Class Two and Class Three terminals, as well, effectively so this is smaller capacity, designed more for the single user. A terminal like this is designed more for enterprise use or a multi-user environment for the remote office or some of the multi-user environment. All of the terminals have been tested for extreme weather conditions. A terminal like this can actually be mounted outside on a simple Pullman with cable drop into the building, if it’s in a fixed location. There’s nothing needed to protect it, although for most of the utility installations, it is being deployed inside an enclosure. The enclosure just ensures a longer life of the terminal, although we’ve got terminals that have been deployed for five, six years really since this service was launched or still in service. Why I’m I doing what I’m doing? I think it’s very interesting. It’s probably the challenge of solving a problem, I mean, the problem being the lack of communications in some geographies. It’s not just in North America but around the world. Inmarsat is a global company. Our satellite network provides service anywhere on the surface of the earth. If you’re looking at the utility sector in the North America, there’s a great opportunity for us because there are a number of areas where terrestrial networks do not reach. If you start looking at markets in Latin America and Asia, you see an even greater opportunity because while you’ve got terrestrial networks in the populated areas, if you get to more remote locations, you’ve got a lot of infrastructure that’s not reachable with existing technology. I think it’s everything from solving a problem for a utility to sort of the exciting element, I guess, of being able to provide a cutting edge technology to anyone, anywhere.

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