Basin Electric Power Cooperative Lays Communications Foundation with Mission-Critical Microwave Platform

April 12, 2012
Aviat Networks has announced an agreement to provide Basin Electric Power Cooperative with its Eclipse Packet Node microwave platform.

Aviat Networks, Inc. has announced an agreement to provide Basin Electric Power Cooperative with its Eclipse Packet Node microwave platform. Aviat Networks will supply the Eclipse Packet Node platform backed by turnkey professional services to completely replace its existing North Dakota and South Dakota network. The multi-million dollar agreement with Basin Electric continues Aviat Networks' relationship with this electric utility to more than 15 years.

Using Basin Electric's infrastructure at existing radio sites, Aviat Networks will roll out a replacement network based on the Eclipse Packet Node microwave platform, a next-generation Hybrid radio that supports existing TDM and future IP traffic in native formats for maximum throughput and lowest latency. Eclipse Packet Node's enhanced system gain feature and Adaptive Coding and Modulation (ACM) technology enables upgrading of Basin Electric's 45Mbps infrastructure to 360Mbps throughput at the same antenna sizes. This upgrade will significantly increase the capacity of the microwave network to accommodate Basin Electric's traffic growth. The company's professional services team will design the network and provide full turnkey services to Basin Electric to have the microwave network in place in North Dakota and South Dakota by the first quarter of 2013.

"The current microwave radio system has been in service for 15 years," said Boyd Trester, project engineer with Basin Electric. "The existing system does not have the bandwidth to carry the additional protective relaying, SCADA, mobile radio, data and voice channels to support system growth. The new Aviat Networks microwave radio system will have eight times the capacity of the current system, which is necessary to support our generation and transmission expansion."

In addition to leveraging infrastructure and dramatically expanding available bandwidth, Eclipse Packet Node provides this electric utility with highly reliable uptime -- especially compared to fiber -- for the harsh environment of North Dakota and South Dakota, where Basin Electric has many of its operations.

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