Pipeline Case Study

Galaxy Broadband was approached by a large global natural resource development corporation that just recently purchased an existing natural gas pipeline in Northern British Columbia.

Previous monitoring of the pipeline was done by a large telecommunication company and the level of service was not satisfactory to the pipeline owner.

This gas transmission pipeline system starts in Northern British Columbia and extends over 500 kilometres to the West coast.

This pipeline goes over 5 mountain ranges in an area that has measureable pre precipitation 65% of the days in a year with rain (250cm/year) or snow (350cm/year).

The sites were equipped with supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) in order to remotely monitor and control: site alarms, gas flows, pipeline capacity and mission critical operational data. All SCADA information was sent back to a monitoring control station in Edmonton, Alberta. The installation of a .98M Ka Band satellite system at each location was used to send SCADA data via IP over VSAT. Galaxy’s solution implements QoS priorities and VLANs to segment SCADA trac, VoIP and recreational surfing ensuring consistent and continuous application delivery.

Galaxy Broadband Communications worked with a local partner in Terrace, Coast Mountain Wireless, as well as the monitoring centre, SCADA technology, electronic engineers, and safety officials for the implementation of this project
in the Summer of 2014.

With Galaxy Broadband Communications system in place they are able to provide the customer access to real time data through Galaxy’s FleetVU monitoring application, which allows them to review usage on a per site= basis, alerts related to service plan usage and historical graphing.