PowerHUB: networked monitoring and maintenance

In the late 1970s, the states of North and South Carolina of BellSouth Telecommunications embarked upon a vigorous mechanical switching system replacement schedule. As candidate offices were considered, many selection criteria were used to prioritize locations. Some of these included building turn-around space, switch age, economic earnings potential for vertical services, and power plant condition and/or age. When and where possible, a conscious decision was made to modernize or replace power plants to help mitigate maintenance problems and promote power reliability. Since the history of power usage and consumption for digital switches was an unknown at the time, power deployment plans were developed to include remote monitoring capabilities. This paper discusses the development of the monitoring systems upto the present system-PowerHUB, which is comprised of: custom client/server software written in Microsoft Visual Basic; Windows NT operating system; Microsoft Database Engine (MSDE) as the data storage/report generation tool; PowerHUB computers (centrally located in one CO); network-based terminal servers hardware (remotely located in various COs); and various engine monitoring hardware packages (located with the engines).