Hydro One Telecom pulls network solution out of the air

According to one company insider, employees of Ontario's provincial utility company Hydro One Inc. working in rural locations sometimes rent hotel rooms just to get high-speed Internet connections, because broadband connectivity at the firm's remote offices is so unreliable. If Hydro One can't connect its own employees, how would it support a new government-mandated "smart meter" network for citizens across the entire province?That was the major question facing Hydro One Telecom Inc., the subsidiary charged with making the smart meter network a reality. At the Canadian Utility Telecom Conference in Toronto on March 29, Leonard Gross, Hydro One Telecom's VP of engineering, spelled out the problem, and explained how his company found a solution.The provincial government legislated smart meter usage a number of years ago as an energy conservation effort. They track exactly how much energy residents use, making it easier for people to adjust their usage for efficiency - running the dishwasher at night, for instance, results in a lower bill. But creating the data infrastructure to support smart metering would be a challenge. According to Gross, the public institution would have to extend its communication network well beyond its existing roots. The organization had a SONET ring as a kind of metro-area backbone, but the last mile to the residents' homes - or "the last 50" miles in Hydro One Telecom's case - simply didn't exist in rural and outlying areas.Whatever the organization built to supplement connectivity, Hydro One Telecom would have to justify the cost. But a network deployed only to support smart metering was anything but cost effective. "The business case makes no sense," Gross said, noting somewhat cynically that if the network were built solely for the purpose of reducing energy consumption, raising the electricity rates would do just as well, for less money.So the infrastructure would also have to support other productivity enhancing, revenue-generating or cost-reducing applications, such as remote equipment monitoring, load control on the electricity grid and electricity theft detection. If the company played this right, it would also improve SONET network density through increased usage. And it would also pave the way for better broadband penetration in parts of the province under-served by traditional telecom service providers.Hydro One Telecom considered fibre and some of the other usual suspects, but found them too expensive. Broadband power line (BPL) technology wouldn't work either, although it turns electricity transmission lines into high-speed data links and ostensibly leverages the utility provider's installed distribution infrastructure. BPL proved to be too costly as well: the customer-to-local transformer ratio was too low to make it go.That left wireless, with the organization ultimately settling on WiMAX. "We did not want to end up with an orphan," Gross said, explaining that Hydro One Telecom sought a standard wireless protocol, not a proprietary system. The company is testing the technology in the Barrie area. WiMAX is used to monitor a rural distribution station; the company gets a glimpse into the pertinent measurements of station health and stability, so any problems might be spotted remotely, before the firm sends a technician to take a closer look. This is one example of the kinds of auxiliary applications that the smart meter network could support.Download speeds in the Barrie trial reach 20 Mbps. That's on a practically empty network, of course, but it's encouraging nonetheless.Regarding broadband support, Gross said Hydro One Telecom could turn the WiMAX substructure into a wholesale system for high-speed Internet retailers, but the organization has no plans to become a retail ISP itself. He added, however, that his organization is essentially building a support system for all sorts of network activity, such as home security.Gross said that by the end of 2007, 250,000 smart meters will be installed in Ontario. With its new wireless network, Hydro One Telecom will have the capacity to support the thousands more due to come online in the future - and perhaps also allow employees in remote offices to download their email attachments without having to rent a room.

Hydro One Telecom pulls network solution out of the air

News | April 3, 2007

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