Insights
2 March 2022
Road Network Control Rooms – Carrier selection and site designs
Moving directly from our initial engagement, we kicked off an expanded scope, which was to assist in the technical delivery of each traffic control room; this expanded scope ran over 12 months, providing ongoing support to the customer in their project execution.
For each traffic control room we reviewed the site-specific customer data aligning each service to the communications pattern; this data formed the basis for selecting carrier service and costing, while informing the basis of the site design document.
We produced a site design document to capture all the reliant information ahead of leading a workshop to gather site specific information along with local knowledge on complex communications pattern (e.g., cellular replacing dial-up modems).
The workshop also served to gain an insight into the team’s telecommunication knowledge; in many cases the team had generalist IT experience, so we provided guidance to ensure the team came away with a boarder telecommunications education and awareness. This education played a key role in ensuring the site was able to implement and support the environment in the future.
With the workshop complete the site design document was updated to capture local knowledge, before finalising the site design we worked directly with the customer’s project manager to include complex communications patterns as part of the site design or as a separate document do we could work with a more specific technical team.
Following the site design document two further documents were produced; the first was a runsheet this provided the customer with an ability to track preparation works, installation tasks and go-live (including roll back tasks) for each site deployment.
The second document was a test plan; this prescribed the approach to testing the current environment to create base level for the environment ahead of works; followed by go-live and roll back testing to ensure the environment operated as intended.
With onsite works completed, we worked with the local team to update the site design document to an As-Built document, this was complemented by knowledge base articles for the team and service desk.
Complex communications patterns which had been “spun out” as a separate document were created as a parallel activity to site design and as-built documents.
These documents often called for a deeper design to ensure legacy technologies (e.g. serial communications) were understood by users.
Progility Technologies worked with a number of IT teams from different disciplines to educate them on the requirements, legacy technology constraints and the ways to cater for these technologies in a modern environment.
With the design created, we worked with the deployment team to test and troubleshoot the new solution to ensure it fulfilled the same requirements as the current deployment.
The completion of the engagement saw 12 traffic control rooms migrated to SIP based communications, with an average of two complex communications patterns to support Machine-to-Machine (M2M) for data collection, real time messages for road users, qir quality monitoring of tunnels; along with facilitating secure remote access to partners and service providers. All with minimal disruptions to the business and their customer.
How our solution fulfilled the customer’s requirements
| Requirement/s | Critical communications consulting. |
| What drove the requirement/s | High level design for critical communications infrastructure. |
| How we fulfilled the requirement/s | Progility Technologies worked alongside the customer to deploy their technology roadmap with minimal disruption or downtime. |
