Data and Voice Transmission Along Gas Pipes

Problem Description

Oil and gas pipelines are a very specific part of industry. Laying fibre optics along a gas pipeline is very risky. In specific conditions, in Siberia for example, permafrost can easily damage the fibre optics cable. Besides that, fibre optics are exposed to civil works, very often taking place along pipelines. Distance between the pipeline and the fibre optics track should be significant in order to avoid the cable from being collateral damage of civil works. Not to mention a case of explosion, where all installations in a distance of 100 meters from the pipe will melt due to extreme heat produced in the explosion. These are just some of the reasons, why in many cases microwave links are used instead of an optical network.

Proposed Solution

Typically, containers will be designed at each 25 to  50 km along the pipeline. These non-attended sites will not be allocated much bandwidth, since they are intended for interconnection of measurement channels, emergency phone and terrestrial voice radio transmitters. However, approx. each 100 km there should be constructed a larger site with human crew and pipeline operation support. Such locations will provide a more complex communications scheme, such as PABX connectivity, business network interface, pipeline process control support , etc. All these requirements will be implemented using drop/insert functionality.

Basic Design

Benefits

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