The use public wireless network technologies for electricity network telecontrol

The potential for using public wireless networks technologies for remote control and monitoring within all sectors of the utility industry has been recognized for sometime, however there have always been a number of concerns, both technical and commercial, which have been significant enough to hinder the wide scale adoption of such technologies in this market. The use of telecontrol in the UK electricity industry can be split into two main categories - traditional hierarchical based telecontrol systems and secondary telecontrol and automation systems. It can be seen that, generally each category has different requirements for telecoms. Traditional networks need constant real time communication between RTU (remote terminal unit) master station while the RTUs on the secondary schemes have the possibility to communicate intermittently.