Wi-LAN : a Great product for a Great City (Cape Town)

As a growing vibrant city we found the need to centralize our acquired field-data from our various smaller electricity control centres to one main electricity control centre for our large service area. 

We developed a central hi-site in the region of the existing control centres to start concentrating the different types of SCADA and Load Management systems to one point. Our attempts at establishing a link from there to our new control centre lead us eventually to use the WiLan AWE 45-24 Hopper equipment. For the first time we had a reliable cost effective communications link with more then enough capacity for our needs. 

That was back in 2000 and since then our area and systems have grown even more and so did our WiLan radio network. At this stage we are utilizing a few of the WiLan range of equipment including the AWE 120-24 and the Ultima 3 5.8 GHz Extended Range.  

We have a few links running over an average distance of 20 km and one 5.8 GHz link running 36 km over mixed terrain ranging from built-up, open fields and water.  

Most of our systems are serial data equipment and we extensively use serial-to-ethernet converter equipment to connect to our WiLan Ethernet WAN. Recent developments in the SCADA industry now allow us to connect with TCP/IP directly into our field equipment. Now we have the opportunity to incorporate the WiLan Access Point equipment into our system. This will greatly enhance our overall system performance. 

All the existing data links perform extremely well and the flexibility of the WiLan equipment eases installation and configuration. We found the ability of remote configuration with the choice of SNMP, Telnet and a WEB interface very useful, not only in first-time setup but also for regular link maintenance. 

We feel secure with our choice to use WiLan equipment. Product support is excellent from Wireless LAN (Pty) Ltd and their new local supplier SSE Data Networks. Our future developments will most certainly include WiLAN as we trust their performance and reliability.

Jannie Welman

Snr Technician SCADA & Load Management

City of Cape Town: Tygerberg Administration