Greentech Lead Canada: Hydro One Telecom, which operates the largest electricity transmission and distribution systems in Ontario, has selected Ericsson’s Operational Support Systems (OSS) as the foundation for its network and service management efforts.
The utility company turned to Ericsson to address the complexities associated with managing its grid infrastructure to ensure reliable power delivery. With new devices being added to the mix, from wind turbines to smart meters and more, there are now thousands of new potential points of failure.
Hydro One Telecom was faced with an expanding telecom network that had outgrown its management tools. Its disparate network inventory systems were built around ad hoc data. As a result, the information they contained was inaccurate and unreliable.
Hydro One Telecom recognized the need for a comprehensive inventory management system for its telecommunications assets – one that would maintain up-to-date, accurate information on all key network elements, attributes and configurations. This system would become the cornerstone for allowing it to quickly and efficiently identify network issues and impacted grid elements.
Ericsson was selected to deploy its Granite Inventory, Network Engineer and COMMON LANGUAGE solutions.
Granite Inventory stores information about the entire multi-vendor, multi-technology communications infrastructure, topology, IP addresses, firmware and configurations. Ericsson Network Engineer provides the company’s personnel with a graphically rich view of its network, while COMMON LANGUAGE provides a uniform set of location identifiers.
“Our SIA tool can pull out the information it needs to determine what services are down and identify the remaining level of network redundancy to the power system,” said Dan DeJesus, IT program manager, Hydro One Telecom.
“With this information at hand, the power specialists can decide whether to shut down the power line entirely, reduce the power load, or take no immediate action,” DeJesus added. “Since its deployment, service impact analysis time has been reduced from hours to less than a minute.”