Remote access: communication technology

4 June 2015



With the digitisation of the oil and gas industry – and exploration and production continuing to march towards increasingly remote and far-flung locations – robust and reliable communication is more of a priority than ever for companies. Technip’s Guillaume Turpin and CEZ Consulting’s Ian Theophilus discuss the trials, tribulations and technology of keeping upstream online.


Whether it is helping to support an offshore well in Australia or taking part in the planning process for a new umbilical manufacturing plant in Angola, oil industry majors and service companies are handling and transferring large volumes of digital data around the globe. To do that reliably and quickly demands a robust 'backbone' network, and the ability to plug in new field sites quickly - no matter where in the world they are.

"Intelligent well tools, SCADA systems, remote fault-finding or interpretation of seismic data - the digital oilfield is really what's driving the way we connect remote frontier locations back to the corporate HQ," says Ian Theophilus, field telecoms consultant at CEZ Consulting. "As machine-to-machine automation increases and the digital oilfield becomes more of a standard in the industry, I think we'll see a step change in how we provide the comms to support that."

Theophilus also points to greater concern for crew welfare as part of the contributing factors to this hunger for bandwidth. "Services like IPTV and Skype are things that staff want to use wherever they are, and that's going to continue to be a driver for additional bandwidth," he says.

The network of energy industry project management, engineering and construction contractor Technip must deliver reliable, high-capacity communications to keep design and project management teams in close contact with their colleagues. With the workload and risks involved in managing very large projects being more than a single office can manage, the company's daily business routine depends on rapid data transfer between widely distributed locations.

Daily fibre

"A project can be subsea, offshore or onshore," says Guillaume Turpin, Technip's group telecoms manager. "Paris might run the project, but it may involve engineers and managers at many other different regional operations centres globally."

This constant collaboration requires the sharing, discussing and updating of complex planning documents every day. 3D models, multicentre conferencing, different releases of project documents, maps, videos and images - all have to be transferred digitally in high volumes.

"To do this, they have to exchange a lot of data and use real-time voice and video conferencing," explains Turpin. "You need to be able to cope with high volumes and offer the bandwidth to let people work wherever they are."

To avoid working on the wrong project document version or sharing a rough draft with the client, the constant synchronisation offered by electronic document management systems (EDMS) and other supporting systems is essential.

"EDMS is one of the major applications used by our organisations to work on projects," says Turpin. "You have to ensure that the quality of the network is good enough to replicate and validate document data properly from one centre to another."

In remote oil and gas operations, the options that offer enough throughput for broadband challenges like that are fibre, satellite and microwave. Fibre is usually the first option, but exploration wells are often inconveniently located far from the nearest data centre. Here, microwave's solid reliability and high speed makes it the default second choice, though its line-of-sight nature means it cannot connect to moving ships and semi-submersible rigs, and its range is limited to around 100km.

"If we are able to use microwave to link to a local network, we will absolutely do that," says Theophilus, "but you are often limited to VSAT [very small aperture terminal] communication to get back onto the corporate network."

As a relatively portable and well-established remote communications standard, VSAT equipment employs a small - less-than-3m-diameter - satellite dish, and can offer anything up to around 20Mbit a second of bandwidth. However, sending large amounts of data this way can be prohibitively expensive.

"The cost-per-megabit when you talk about satellite bandwidth in remote locations is quite high," says Theophilus. "I've been pushing for lower costs for years, and we are starting to see pricing come down."

"The MPLS label’s extra routing information also means that different types of data can be treated in different ways – something that’s hard to do with a traditionally routed IP network." 

Billing per-megahertz for bandwidth instead of per-megabit for data is one option, while advanced VSAT techniques like 'bursting' offer another way to reduce charges. If a large chunk of data has to be sent at a certain time, it's possible to ramp up and allocate bandwidth to that, then turn it back down again.

Where data capacity is limited, optimisation and compression techniques, such as wide-area network (WAN) optimisation and acceleration, or quality of service prioritisation (discussed later), can be used to provide the data transfer rate required to support operations - But it's far more efficient to provide high bandwidth in the first place.

New satellite technology from suppliers like O3b look like the way to achieve this. Next-generation high-throughput satellites (HTS) use narrower, more focused transmission beams that help them achieve much higher data rates than conventional VSAT satellites are capable of, with speeds up to 100 times faster.

As the satellies are positioned in medium Earth orbit (MEO), rather than the geostationary orbits used for VSAT, their closeness to the ground also means signals reach their target more quickly, resulting in lower latency.

"They have been proven to deliver significantly higher-bandwidth, low-latency communications in remote locations, which is really impressive," explains Theophilus. "They are still launching MEO satellites and don't have global coverage as yet, but the technology is going in the right direction, and that can only improve over time."

However, even as bandwidth increases and costs come down, a bigger issue with remote connectivity can be the local equipment licensing for VSAT and microwave links, or indeed any other type of radio-frequency equipment.

"You can find you have to pay six times as much as you're paying in the neighbouring country, it takes three times as long to get your kit in and you have some form of ongoing payment because of local laws," Theophilus explains. "That can be tough, especially so if you want to mobilise quickly."

Labelling theory

One compensation is that it is increasingly easy to find high-speed fibre networks to plug remote links into. Global coverage is continuing to increase - offshore via operators' own fibre grids and onshore through push-to-talk or privately owned 'dark fibre' networks. The growth of these latter facilities means that there's less need for oil and gas operators to own and maintain their own dedicated backbone networks.

Rather than building out and managing its backbone network itself, Technip instead works with a single global outsourced provider. As group telecoms manager, Turpin is responsible for the voice and data communications infrastructure that connects more than 100 sites using a multiprotocol label-switching (MPLS) network.

"Using a single provider makes for a seamless network with consistently high quality of service and incident management," says Turpin. "They can deliver it in almost all locations; even in small countries in Africa and Asia, an MPLS network is available."

Also known by other labels such as 'IP VPN' or 'metro Ethernet', MPLS networks assign a short 'label' to each packet of data they handle containing extra information on how it should be routed. This means there's no need to examine the packet itself as it travels around the MPLS network - the label provides all the information that's needed to route it to its destination.

The fact that the label carries forwarding information independently from the underlying data link's own protocol makes MPLS extremely versatile. Operators can use MPLS to connect across a wide variety of transport media, linking disparate virtual private networks (VPNs) and other IP networks into one hybrid, coherent WAN communications grid. Its versatility means the IP VPNs used offshore or in remote areas like Siberia across satellite or microwave can be connected to an MPLS backbone with ease. Depending on the specific mix of applications and network configuration, MPLS-based services can reduce costs by 10-25% over comparable data services such as frame relay and asynchronous transfer mode.

"Where people are using data centres to host their backbone, as long as it is a carrier-neutral data centre, then we don't have any problem with hooking in third-party providers," says Theophilus. "Today, you'll usually find that any VSAT provider has backbone fibre facilities from their own Earth stations back to wherever you want to go."

Conducting the traffic

The MPLS label's extra routing information also means that different types of data can be treated in different ways - something that's hard to do with a traditionally routed IP network. For example, packets carrying real-time traffic, such as voice or video, can be directed to low-latency, high-speed routes. This built-in capability to prioritise traffic types is known as quality of service.

Using a 'mesh network' topology is another key part of Technip's strategy that MPLS helps support. That means each site can connect directly with every other one, offering higher data rates. The alternative - employing hub-and-spoke design using regional centres - runs the risk of introducing bottlenecks.

"MPLS makes it possible to interconnect many different sites directly without using a single centre for all communications," says Turpin. "Using hubs can cause performance issues and latency. MPLS ensures you always take the most direct route."

Just as remote sites always need a back-up for their primary comms channel, so MPLS data centres and other key sites can be connected in multiple redundant ways to cloud back-up and to other sites on the network. That makes the network more resilient and reliable than other network types.

"MPLS is a standard in oil and gas," notes Theophilus. "Most companies now are hooked into an MPLS cloud to carry their traffic. Certainly, it has been part of any network I've been involved in for the past few years."

To keep its mission-critical global networks moving, the oil and gas industry continues to take the lead in adopting the latest broadband technology. This is unlikely to change; as the digital oilfield becomes the standard way to do business, its users' demand for transfer speed and capacity will only increase.

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