Speaking at the 2015 IQPC Oil and Gas Communications summit in Houston, Shane Meche stated that the number one requirement for oil country telecommunications is predictability. Meche enumerated the many factors, from transmitter power through bandwidth, antenna gain, terrain and weather, that influence communications. He showed how consistent communications can be achieved even across a complex environment of a Canadian oil sands development. Large mobile mining and transportation units require constant communications to share data on machine health, autonomous operations, fatigue management and more.
Meche along with other presentations sees the Long term evolution (LTE) spec as the future of oil country communications. Bob Prichard (Proactive Energy Services) gave a detailed backgrounder on LTE which should provide high bandwidth to ‘nomadic’ applications but may be overkill for fixed sites where its cost may be hard to justify. LTE should also be a good option for ‘hybrid service applications.’
IBM unit Aspera was also presenting its Fast general purpose data transfer technology that promises maximum bandwidth use in long hop data transfers over the public internet. More from IQPC.
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