Bespoke Design

Bespoke fibre solution for National Grid

Universal provided a deployable fibre solution for temporary connectivity at substations situated throughout England for National Grid. As an integral part of the UK electrical transmission system, substations require regular maintenance to ensure the network continues to operate safely and reliably.

A vital requirement was for durable and rugged cabling and equipment, due to the conditions the engineers work in at the substations and because they are familiar with using extremely rugged and heavy power connectors. The best balance of durability and cost came from an ArmourLux-Neutrik hybrid; an ArmourLux cable and reel with Neutrik DUO sockets at both ends.  Once deployed, a 1m Neutrik DUO Advanced cable ‘patched’ the sockets to the trailer and control centre.

Read the full case study here.

RAF Shawbury high resilience network

A site wide intercom/speaker system was required, but there was insufficient fibre cabling infrastructure to support it. The Qsys system is highly resilient and requires redundant high speed switches to support it’s operation. Only a few are approved by Qsys and none were suitable for the design.

There were many cabling ducts and some fibre optic cabling on site, but it was unclear on routes and how useable the cables were if they existed.

Auditing of existing fibre included testing and creating new schematics. 11km of new 12 core OM3 Brand Rex fibre cables were installed to support the design. The switches selected were Allied x510 & x610 which support GbE and 10GbE and offer zero delay failover. Dual switches interconnected by resilient active routes were installed in all 37 buildings.

Bandwidth upgrade using installed cables

A floating petroleum storage ship based in the Far East was pre installed with Multimode cables which supported 100Mb. They required an upgrade to Gigabit, but the cable lengths were above the maximum supported.

The most economical solution was to install Mode Conditioning cables throughout and Singlemode SFP’s into existing network switches, thus increasing the useable distance to 550m, and avoiding the huge expense of replacing cabling.

Custom deployable fibre for Doosan

Doosan approached Universal Networks (UN) looking for a compatible cabling solution to work with their upgraded data network system. After looking at the current network diagram, Liz Waterhouse, Account Manager at UN, suggested some changes to simplify the plan and eliminate the number of points of failure. Most importantly, the solution put forward to Doosan worked with the upgraded inspection system.

Read the full case study here.

Marine fibre to replace failing copper

On a vessel used for Seismic survey operations, a copper link was used from the bridge to a small container all the way down at the bow of the ship which housed electronic equipment that relays the seismic data back to the bridge. The cabling kept failing so we replaced it with pre-terminated armoured fibre and industrial media converters installed into an IP rated box.

One fibre cable to replace many

Also a bridge to container link, this one was semi temporary and required 24 fibres. We specified a Loose Tube external fibre and terminated into a single 24 way MTP connector, glanded for secure container entry.  We used MTP to LC panels each end to enable connection to devices. The 24 fibre MTP connector facilitated quick and easy connectivity.