Borås Energi & Miljö

Application: Network for remote monitoring and control of water treatment plants, pumping stations and booster stations
Location: Borås, Sweden
End customer: Borås Energi och Miljö
Products: Wolverine, DDW-22x and DDW-1x0

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The water and waste water department (VA-verken) in the city of Borås is responsible for more than 200 waste water and drinking water installations, providing water services for the whole city. These installation consist of waste water and water treatment plants, pumping stations and booster stations.

Many of these plants and stations can be remotely monitored and supervised. Telephone modems and short-haul modems has been the technology to provide for the connectivity. In recent years modems have been replaced with a more flexible and reliable solution using the Wolverine Ethernet Extenders.

“We have successfully used Westermo products in previous communication solutions with different modems. When we decided to modernise our system we contacted Westermo once again” says Jan Cullberg, computer engineer at VA-verken.

The old system communicated over a legacy city network, and by making use of pre-existing cabling, they have been able to keep the cost down.

If  serial data communication is to be replaced by Ethernet one has to put in new cabling, either Cat5 or fibre cable. However, using the Westermo SHDSL concept, the DDW units will convert Ethernet so it can be run on any kind of existing cable. SHDSL (Symmetrical High Bit-rate Digital Subscriber Loop) is based on the same technique as an ADSL connection to the Internet.

A single, twisted pair can be used on distances up to 14 km between two DDW units at a speed of 15.3 Mbit/s. Choosing The DDW-22x, it also contains a switch with 4 Ethernet ports making the hook up of several units easy.

The new system has resulted in increased availability on many levels and in contrast to previously used devices, the Wolverine series has several advantages. The DDW-22x is not only faster and more reliable, it also makes it possible to remotely configure for example a PCL. Another advantage was the possibility to use legacy equipment together with the DDW-22x.

“To obtain a secure and reliable information flow from the different reading instrument in our system, it was an absolute necessity to find a faster communications solution. We are happy how this worked out and there are several other interesting solutions that have been made possible using an Ethernet solution.” says Jan Cullberg.