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WGP-Transco Finds a New Job for Old Wires September 20, 1999 By Kelly Jackson Higgins Sometimes the budget's the thing. When Williams Gas Pipeline-Transco began building local-area networks at the 43 compressor stations that drive its gas pipeline from Texas to New Jersey, the company had to scrap plans for fiber and instead use its existing phone wiring, some of which was 30 years old. WGP-Transco officials realized they had to network twice the number of buildings at each compressor site than they had planned, so the $120,000 budget for wiring within buildings at the sites precluded fiber-based LANs. "We took our existing copper wiring, some Tut Systems extenders and made 10BASE-T LANs for a nominal cost--600 feet for less than $500," says Tami Earl, team leader for network services and telecommunications at the Houston-based gas pipeline company. "We would have stuck with the fiber solution if we were wiring just two buildings at each site." Sure, 10BASE-T is about as sexy as a 9,600-bps modem these days, but in reality not every application needs more than 10 Mbps. Earl says the 10BASE-T LANs are more than enough for the low-volume office applications at the compressor stations, each of which typically has only about 12 users. Fiber is still in the cards for the local backbones, however; WGP-Transco is building a fiber-based LAN infrastructure for the gas-compression operation at each site. The 10BASE-T business LANs will run as subnets to these new fiber 10-Mbps Ethernet LANs, which will run the devices that control the gas compressors. Both the fiber and copper LANs will link into the company's private frame-relay WAN, so the devices that control the compressors can be managed locally or remotely over the WAN. "The equipment that runs the pipeline is mission-critical," according to Earl. "We are building a 24x7, redundant fiber LAN, called the Station Automation Fiber Project." The new fiber infrastructure should allay fears about lightning strikes and other potential network interruptions to the compressor stations--not to mention the ability to hike up the bandwidth when necessary. "Fiber is always better to connect building-to-building, and we have some areas prone to lightning hits," Earl says. WGP-Transco had to do some extensive grounding of the 10BASE-T LAN wiring, as well as extra surge protection, to prevent lightning strikes from knocking out the copper LANs. Even so, there's no way to prevent a strike. "If it doesn't get us on the network side, it can get us on the power side," Earl notes. "We try to minimize the potential for damage with fiber and in-line protection devices and surge protectors," as well as hot-standby devices for key devices, just in case. In the meantime, WGP-Transco is installing Gigabit Ethernet at its Houston headquarters for its server farms, and 100-Mbps Ethernet to replace older 16-Mbps token-ring LANs. "Our backbone [at headquarters] is fiber, and copper to the desktops," Earl says.
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