Queensland Gas Corporation (QGC) has chosen Motorola Solutions to manage and support network operations for a liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in southern Queensland.
Motorola won the contract after completing a microwave and 33-site digital radio system for QGC late last year. The $32 million network is one of the largest Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) wireless networks in Australia.
Under the new $10 million contract, Motorola will manage and operate the communication network for the project’s main gas compression sites. That includes an upstream control room in Chinchilla and, starting 1 January 2015, the midstream LNG plant on Curtis Island near Gladstone.
Motorola has pledged service performance and network guarantees that radio services for operations and emergency response management remain uninterrupted, it said.
The contract also includes a managed location service to monitor the whereabouts of all on-site employees and contractors.
Motorola will manage all in-field wireless communications from a network operations centre in Melbourne. The vendor said it will also provide on-site support.
QGC’s liquefied natural gas project is one of Australia’s largest capital infrastructure projects, involving expanding exploration and development in southern and central Queensland, and transporting gas through a 540-kilometre underground pipeline network to Curtis Island where it will be liquefied.
The microwave and TETRA digital radio system has provided a wide area communication network linking the central processing plant in the gas fields to QGC’s processing plants, field compression stations, main line valve stations, Chinchilla office and logistics facility, and its corporate office in Brisbane.
The network supports more than 1,500 devices, including vehicle terminals with GPS tracking, hand-held terminals, desk terminals, dispatcher console and voice recording equipment.
Adam Bender covers telco and enterprise tech issues for Computerworld and is the author of dystopian sci-fi novels We, The Watched and Divided We Fall. Follow him on Twitter: @WatchAdam
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