CelPlan’s portfolio of wireless products and solutions enables the deployment of reliable wireless networks to support essential operations of the oil & gas industry, such as real-time monitoring and analytics to improve efficiency and safety.
Communications for the oil and gas industry need to be reliable and resilient, to operate over large areas under extreme environmental conditions. Production and distribution usually occur in remote area under harsh conditions. Telecommunications play an increasingly important role in the industry’s efforts to reduce CAPEX and OPEX. High-speed, reliable telecommunications allow off-site monitoring and control both on remote, land-based operations and offshore facilities. Oil and gas companies often rely on wireless communication solutions to control, monitor, and transfer critical data.
CelPlan can help in the entire life cycle of your solution, with network pre-deployment tasks as well as post-deployment optimization.
Pre-deployment
Before defining a strategy, CelPlan can help your team determine what are the technology options that will better tackle your needs considering the resources you may already have such as existing infrastructure and spectrum availability. CelPlan can create a draft design to be used for an RFP or technology and spectrum validation.
Before deploying a wireless network, it is important to verify that the spectrum selected is, in fact, clean of interference. This can be achieved by what is known as a spectrum-clearing drive test. CelPlan can provide both the service to verify spectrum usage and locate sources of interference or provide your team with CellSpectrum, a software defined spectrum analyzer system.
Once the spectrum is validated and you are ready to move to the planning phase, use the same equipment to collect CW (Continuous Wave) samples for calibrating the propagation model in the planning tool. Once again, if this is out of scope for your team, CelPlan can assist with everything from data collection to post-processing and model calibration.
With all the prep work out of the way, CelPlan can help with your network design, working alongside your team and the selected vendor to make sure that existing infrastructure and selected equipment are properly modeled. As part of the design, CelPlan also does an initial optimization of resources, which can include, depending on the technology, frequency planning, PCI plan, and physical cell adjustments such as sector azimuth and antenna tilt.
Post-Deployment
Optimize your network continuously as new devices are added and new coverage and capacity needs arise. Use CellPerfomance, for example, to expand your frequency plan or assign additional PCIs (Physical Cell ID).
During and after deployment, validate your coverage using our CellSpectrum and CellScanner software-defined system; data throughput, latency, and other performance parameters can be continuously analyzed using CellProbe setup; CelPlan can assist you with both these tasks.
During Roll-out
As the network roll-out starts, it is important for your team to keep the plan updated and keep up with changes as they happen to see how the overall design might be affected. Using a different antenna height, changing connection of devices to a different server, changing antenna types, or removing/adding sites to the network, are examples of everyday happenings during deployment that can affect the predicted network performance. CelPlan can provide you with all the tools from our CellDesigner Suite that allows your team to plan, update, and replan the network as needed.
CellDesigner Suite includes our network planning tool CelPlanner, CellNetwork our point-to-point module, as well as our optimization module, CellPerformance. If your team has little or no experience with network planning tools, not to worry, part of CelPlan’s network design offering includes a transition plan to help your team acclimate with the use of a network planning tool. The training class we offer is centered on your project so your team members will be learning to network‑plan from day one. Our customer support is personalized and customized for your needs; you will speak to a trained RF engineer familiar with your industry. And CelPlan will always be there should you need additional consulting or a specific task that your team might be too busy to tackle.
