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When a personal LTE take a look at community at Utility Broadband Affiliation (UBBA) Plugfest 2021 was briefly disabled, attendees might be forgiven for going to get a snack. The take a look at would measure our router’s failover time from Anterix’s 900 MHz personal LTE to AT&T’s FirstNet. For many routers that’s about 5 minutes. However simply 5 seconds later the Cisco Catalyst IR1101 Rugged Sequence Router had reconnected to FirstNet. The snackers missed it. Image it: line-status fault location, isolation, and repair restoration (FLISR) in 5 seconds versus 5 minutes. It’s an enormous advance for resilient grid operations.
This take a look at happened at UBBA’s first ever plugfest, held in St. Louis from October 18-21, 2021. Based in 2019, UBBA’s mission is to assist members plan, design, and deploy safe, dependable, and resilient personal broadband networks to assist crucial infrastructure. Members embody main utilities, expertise suppliers, and methods integrators—all working collectively to share the newest approaches to grid communications, safety, and resiliency. Cisco is a founding member of the UBBA, and we’re big followers of its collaborative method to constructing a contemporary grid to maintain folks protected and society productive.
What’s a plugfest?
A plugfest is an occasion the place resolution suppliers come collectively in a single place to check interoperability. This 12 months’s UBBA Plugfest 2021 targeted on distribution automation, however take a look at outcomes additionally apply to different LTE use circumstances comparable to transmission and distribution substations, superior meter collectors, and linked fleet autos. The occasion bought out, an indication that utilities are accelerating their grid modernization applications. Round 300 folks attended in individual to listen to audio system on matters comparable to rural broadband and grid safety, go to vendor cubicles, and watch demonstrations just like the FirstNet failover take a look at I described. Lots of extra attended just about through Webex. We at Cisco had been happy to donate the shared switching and routing infrastructure for Plugfest in addition to Cisco Webex companies to broadcast the occasion to the numerous members becoming a member of just about.
Non-public LTE—its star grows
An increasing number of of our utility prospects are contemplating personal LTE for grid modernization initiatives like distribution automation. LTE is confirmed. And Non-public LTE affords the pace, flexibility, and safety wanted for an enormous quantity and number of endpoints and functions. Narrowband applied sciences like NB-IoT and Cat-M are fantastic for non-critical functions—as an illustration, sensors detecting whether or not poles are leaning or have been hit by a tree or automobile. Broadband is healthier fitted to crucial utility use circumstances. One cause is that broadband helps over-the-air router updates to take care of optimum safety posture. It’s now doable for medium-to-large utilities to deploy profitable personal LTE networks. It’s a confirmed expertise and utilities are discovering financial, operational, and safety benefits to them.
Quick failover, the lacking ingredient till now
The utilities I’ve met with say that enhancing grid resilience is a key cause they’re leaning towards personal LTE. We designed our industrial routers with resilience in thoughts. You may configure the IR1101 with single or twin pluggable communications modules (together with multicarrier modems), twin SIMs, and assist for quite a lot of UE LTE classes. In checks at Plugfest, a single IR1101 connected efficiently to a number of distributors’ developed packet core (EPC) merchandise utilizing CBRS (3500 MHz band), Anterix (900 MHz), US Mobile (850 MHz), and FirstNet (750 MHz). The IR1101 failed over from Anterix to FirstNet with only a 5-second interruption in SCADA polling, utilizing normal IP-SLA configurations.
One router platform, many use circumstances
In addition to being resilient, our industrial routers come in several kind elements to assist varied utility use circumstances. Mount them in racks, on poles, or in autos. Use the identical pluggable modems that had been examined throughout UBBA Plugfest. All fashions are constructed to face up to harsh environmental circumstances like excessive temperatures, mud, frequency interference, surge, and humidity. In fact, additionally they have utility certifications comparable to IEC-61850-3 and IEEE 1613, and adjust to NERC-CIP.
Utilizing one router platform for all of your trendy grid use circumstances means your workforce wants only one ability set. The big pool of Cisco-trained engineers makes these abilities simpler to come back by. Community automation expedites deployment whereas lowering configuration errors. Together, a talented workforce and automation assist mitigate the first reason for all community outages: human error. A standardized router platform and structure additionally make it simpler to implement compliance together with your safety coverage, for stronger cybersecurity safety.
UBBA Plugfest 2021 gave us fortunate attendees an inspiring glimpse into the way forward for the grid—and the facility of collaboration. Verify again for future blogs, when my workforce will focus on the newest in grid modernization and utility digitization.
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