A large utility company providing water and wastewater services to more than five million domestic and commercial customers in the UK was using a telemetry network to monitor the level of water in its reservoirs and water towers. Small data packages were carried around its network and around 30000 sync alarms were largely ignored because the network was so lightly loaded.

The utility decided to port its corporate mission critical traffic onto this network therefore significantly increasing traffic. Without addressing the underlying sync issues in its network, the utility was in danger of losing data critical to its income, as well as vital internal communications. This would lead to interrupted service for its customer base.

Consequently the utility required a higher levels of service from its system integrator.

Working in conjunction with the system integrator, Chronos supplied and installed a GPS based sync network using Symmetricom’s TimeSource 3600. This deployment immediately solved the sync alarm issue consequently and the system integrator was consequently able to defend the Service Level Agreement in place with the utility company. This deployment also enabled the utility to use their network resources to the fullest.

The system integrator also deployed a network of Chronos’ SyncWatch probes to ensure adequate timing performance at the edge of the network. This enables the utility company to efficiently use the network already deployed for any exponential increase in traffic without data loss.

The system integrator manages the utility’s network from its NOC with a SyncWatch server. This gives the SI flexibility to deploy SyncWatch probes in other networks and manage them from the same server. SyncWatch Server is at the core of the distributed synchronisation monitoring solution, SyncWatch Managed. The server application enables remote management of probes, collects data from the probes and provides a range of mechanisms to alert users to potential problems. The server also interfaces to Symmetricom’s TimeMonitor application should additional, more detailed analysis be required for collected synchronisation data.

The SyncWatch probe is a highly flexible synchronisation data acquisition device that can measure a wide range of frequencies found in telecom, broadcast and IT environments.  The probe is able to operate in different “modes” as defined by its firmware.

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