Prior to the replacement program, due to greater distances outside of the cities legacy remote monitoring units had to be polled by master units via a dedicated leased-line. Leased-lines are expensive and multiple modems were required. eircom personnel were spending a lot of time maintaining old monitoring units and peripheral equipment. There were a growing number of faults occurring and trouble-shooting was becoming increasingly costly and time-consuming.
In some built up areas there was a reliance on trunk or junction cables between large and smaller exchanges as a copper report pair was required for data retrieval of the transducer pressure readings from the legacy monitoring unit. Where the junction cables had been retired some smaller exchanges were left unmonitored in these 'copper islands'. Instead of having the copper report pair wired back to the main exchange directly, remote monitoring units had to be installed in the smaller exchanges and leased lines were required so that the data could be retrieved by the master unit. This option was becoming cost prohibitive.
Eircom required a monitoring system to match this changing infrastructure. eircom also needed a remote monitoring unit that was compact, easy to install, and didn't require a leased line for data retrieval. Monitronix's remote monitoring units have provided this solution. The legacy configuration consisted of four cards installed in a rack in the remote exchange with an external modem attached to a leased line to allow polling from a master unit comprising of another two cards and a modem. This configuration has been replaced by Monitronix's small, compact, wall mounted RMU that has an internal modem built in without the requirement for a leased line. Now staff can configure the frequency that the unit is polled by a central monitoring system. Typically pressure readings are updated on the central monitoring system once an hour, but this can be less or more frequent depending on the manager or staffs' requirements. These units also have built in IP functionality to allow for connection to eircom's LAN and almost instantaneous updating of pressure readings.
"In a recent migration across seven exchanges 682 transducers were transferred from old legacy equipment. This resulted in a reduction in faults from 71 to 7, an improvement of 90%."
Tom Mulvey, eircom Pressurisation Programme
Manager