Post date: Oct 30, 2017 2:02:58 PM
In early 2017, Zetel took over an unsuccessful site test from another solution provider, for a WA based mining operation. The site was to consist of 5 towers (20-25m high), with each designed to cover a minimum range of 2 km with primary data rates, and extended coverage distance for up to 5-7 km.
The unsuccessful trial from the other provider was mainly attributed to two reasons:
- complexity in networking topology, as the EPC (LTE Core Network) used was not an industrial grade solution, lacking of ability to adapt to various deployment cases in order to meet application requirements
- product maturity and design capability, professional services supported this deployment were mainly oversea based, and was not able to provide sufficient support for both lacking dedication to this particular use case, and lacking industrial private LTE design and integration experience
After 4.5 months of various types of issues and frustration, customer demanded a change.
Zetel took over the trial site (1 micro-cell) from mid-February, and had a live system up running within 2 weeks, passing all integration tests, without even having to send our own engineers on-site.
The network then grew into 3 cells within another 4 weeks, equipped with all LTE features, including high speed hand-over, advanced QoS, etc. supporting a fleet of 40 vehicles for their Leica Jigsaw FMS, high-precision location, data acquisition, and real-time reporting and monitoring services.
The normal-precision application were allocate for 32/32kbps guaranteed DL/UL rate,
high-precision app with 256/256kbps,
latency on-site was under 30ms consistently,
and end-to-end latency to the back-office via VPN measured at 150ms on average, well below the design target of 250-300ms.
A mixture of narrow-band (using 1.4MHz LTE bandwidth to increase coverage distance) and broadband (on the normal 20MHz spectrum) applications were then on-boarded gradually.
It's been overall a very successful implementation, highlighting the level of product and solution maturity from Zetel, dedication to customer value, and willingness to customize the solution for particular user requirements, but more importantly able to deliver required change within days, instead of weeks or months.