Advanced Street Cabinet Monitoring for Telecom Operators

Context

Our customer, a European Telecom Operator, manages thousands of street cabinets aiming at distributing fiber optic to many buildings for private and professional use. Therefore, if a problem occurs in one street cabinet, people connected to it won’t have internet or a phone access until it is solved.

Challenges

The main challenge for Telecom Operators is to ensure a continuity of service to their customers. This also implies having operational street cabinets. To achieve this, a monitoring solution is required. That’s where Alpha Innovations’ expertise comes in!

Initial situation

Our customer’s previous solution was made of several monitoring units per cabinet provided by different suppliers. Therefore, maintenance and repair were a nightmare to manage and were costly.

Alpha Innovations' solution

Alpha Innovations is now providing an advanced monitoring solution to this Telecom Operator. It consists in a COMPAS card available in 300 and 1000W. Each cabinet requires one card that collects the information on all the equipment inside the cabinet and transfers it to a central point.

What can be monitored?

Besides monitoring the cabinet’s door opening, important measurements are registered, like:

Humidity
Battery and cabinet temperatures
Vibrations (against vandalism attempts)
Water detection
Other external equipment like a fan or heat exchanger

The COMPAS monitoring unit also allows you to efficiently measure the total AC power consumption with a smart energy meter. All data and monitoring are always available since the modem/router to the NOC is powered by a 12VDC source from the energy system.

No need for RFID reader

We can provide an alternative solution by taking advantage of the smartphone handled by technicians, no need for an RFID reader to access the cabinet. The solution can be managed by any SNMP software or by our Inview MESH Web Extension, dedicated to smartphones.

Impacts for the customer

Efficient interventions

As data is transmitted to a central point, the Telecom Operator has an overview of all the street cabinets. He receives alarms and reports informing him about the status of each cabinet. Therefore, when a problem occurs, he can easily identify which street cabinet is concerned and what the problem is. Thanks to this, he can plan the intervention quickly and efficiently.

Quick interventions

Thanks to alarms and reports, the operator is informed of any failure before the end user and can plan an intervention. Therefore, he can reassure the customer and guarantee a short time before everything is up and running again.

Reduced costs/best TCO

With only one platform per cabinet, the management, maintenance and upgrades are easy to handle. Moreover, with COMPAS, operators can operate several actions remotely, limiting the number of on-field interventions: