Romance of the North: satellite posts at base stations, a shovel and incredibly much snow

The satellite post, Dixon,

Krasnoyarsk Territory by area is the largest in the Russian Federation. The territory is huge, and the habitable part is rather small. Some settlements, especially in the northern regions of the region, become difficult to access after stopping navigation on the Yenisei - that is, about 7 months of the year there remains only air transport or a winter road.

Many settlements were founded as far back as the 17th century, and still exist. Such villages mainly serve as supporting bases for geologists, oil industry workers, gold miners and other people whose work is closely intertwined with the north.

In all these villages, it is cellular communication that is the only way to communicate with large land, as well as the opportunity to access the Internet.The first GSM Beeline base station, operating via satellite, was launched in 2003 in the village of Tura.


Local "all-terrain vehicle", p. Sentry, Taimyr

General situation

In the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Beeline mobile communication base stations are installed in almost every large remote settlement. For example, the settlements along the Yenisei River: Bor, Turukhansk are located before the Arctic Circle, and Igarka, Dudinka, Dikson are located beyond the Arctic Circle in the permafrost distribution area, it can be reached relatively easily. But in Baikit, Khatanga or Turu can be reached in most cases only by air.

Base stations are also put on oil and gas fields. For example, there is the Vankor oil and gas field: not only GSM base stations are installed there, but also 3G, because the need for communication is more than high. The base station in the port of Dixon is the northernmost Beeline station, located far beyond the Arctic Circle.


Base station and satellite post, Baikit

Construction and maintenance

The biggest problem in the construction of such base stations is the delivery of equipment, machinery and accessories. The simplest case is during navigation to load equipment in standard 20-ton containers, put on ships and send across the Yenisei to the desired point. Ships go to Dixon. It will be possible to deliver the necessary equipment to Khatanga only by air, since the navigation period is very short.

Base stations are installed standard (previously installed Ericsson 2206, now Ericsson 6601), the main units are the same as throughout the network (we are not talking about cooling and power now). Any base station should be approached by a transport channel that connects it to the operator’s network. For the most remote base stations, a two-way satellite channel acts as such a channel: a satellite dish installed near the base station and a satellite modem.

In large cities, large satellite nodes have been installed to provide a large band: several base stations are connected to them at once. For example, if the call goes from Dixon to Norilsk, then the scheme will be as follows:



In this case, the satellite is located at an altitude of 36 thousand kilometers above the earth in a geostationary orbit, and the total delay in signal transmission can reach 0.5 - 1.5 seconds. These delays are true for both voice and data.

Large satellite nodes can operate with multiple satellites in various modes. Small satellite posts near remote stations, as a rule, are guided by a pre-selected satellite, where satellite capacity is rented. There are several satellites that can be used for work: both the technical feasibility of serving this region (not every satellite serves areas of the far north) and the cost of renting on-board capacity are evaluated. Each time a new base station is launched, the network development department selects the most suitable satellite.

Satellite nodes in large cities are usually placed on the roof of buildings or on a special site outside the city, at remote sites - on special metal frames or suitable to accommodate the building so that there is no antenna shift due to ground movement.

The maintenance of such remote satellite posts has a major problem - snow. He is able to fill up the plate “with a slide”, which can lead to both a deterioration of the signal and its complete disappearance. Therefore, one of the main service tools is a shovel and a broom, which, like a brush, with archaeological accuracy, need to dig up a plate without hitting the converter and changing its azimuth.

Mid-May in Norilsk:




Actually, the service is carried out as follows: in each village there are specialists who are responsible for local communications (for example, engineers serving television stations in the villages). We conclude service agreements with them, because we cannot keep a special person near each base station. Approximately 80% of the situations are resolved thanks to them, in the remaining 20% ​​- replacement nodes and a Beeline specialist are sent by air.

Base stations are installed in specially prepared rooms for this, where there is a mandatory waterproofing, antistatic and so on, as well as enhanced thermal insulation. Without fail, a protective fire door is installed. There are fire sensors, flooding and generally a complete monitoring system that allows you to remotely understand what is wrong in case of malfunctions.


Satellite post, s. Vanavara

Communication

As I said, communication is very active. The fact is that at 6 pm in most remote settlements there is simply nothing to do, so cellular communication and the Internet are very popular. In recent years, there has been a real explosion in the use of social networks. To this it is worth adding that the percentage of people up to 30 in society who are happy to accept new technologies is very high. And smartphones are very common. The income of people in the far north is quite high, there is nowhere to spend much money (villages are cut off from the whole world), therefore, when a person gets to large land, among other things, he almost always buys a top-end smartphone.

Where GSM base stations are being used now, there are GPRS / EDGE channels, but the data transfer speed on them is very dependent on the channel load by voice traffic. Given that the load is always 100% (even in the dead of night there are no breaks at all), the speed is not the highest. Where 3G base stations are installed, we configured them mainly for data transfer, not voice.

At the latest speed measurements in one shift camp of oil industry workers, we got a speed of about 2 Mbps on a regular 3G modem when downloading a long file (this is in real situation when there were a lot of active subscribers in the cell using mobile Internet). At the same time, HTML pages can load quite slowly due to a very long ping via satellite (I recall, from half a second to a half, the limit in the form of the speed of light has not been canceled).

Why can speed vary within such limits? Because today there may be, say, 3 thousand employees at the field, and tomorrow there will be a shift in shift - and the number of employees will increase to 12 thousand people, and at least half of them will communicate with their friends and relatives in other cities, including through Skype

At industrial facilities, M2M is quite actively used - for example, near the North-Yenisei gold ore is transported in BelAZ, and each of them has a block that is continuously monitored.

Development

Since 2003 and the first base station connected via satellite in Tours, we have worked very well on the process of building and commissioning new base stations. In recent years, the consumption of mobile communications and the Internet in the region has been growing very actively, so we continue to expand. Now we are waiting for the summer to open the navigation, and we could start mounting several new base stations at once.