Nokia's Wavence Microwave Powers KCP&L Communications

Kansas City Power & Light is using Nokia’s (News - Alert) microwave network technology. The grid in which this technology is employed serves more than 800,000 customers in the Kansas City, Missouri, area and parts of Kansas.

This is a microwave packet radio solution called Wavence. It was designed to support high-bandwidth services like video. And it can support that as well as grid and data traffic on a single network.

KCP&L has already deployed Wavence at some of its locations. It expects to have it up and running at 40 sites before the end of this year. Twenty-nine additional sites will be turned up with Wavence during a second phase of the project, which will follow shortly thereafter.

The power company is implementing Wavence technology as an overlay to the solution it already has in place. That will allow it to support IP-based applications and expand its bandwidth capability without the need for new antenna infrastructure or communication disruption. It will also enable the incremental migration from time division multiplexing infrastructure to IP-based networking.

“Nokia’s microwave packet radio technology delivers the reliability and performance needed to support our current operations, while providing the scalability and flexibility to introduce new services in the future,” said Melvin Sam Charuvilayil, supervisor of network planning and engineering at KCP&L. “Future proof can be an overused term, but the fact that we can easily transition all our TDM applications in the packet realm seamlessly while supporting our latency-sensitive teleprotection traffic, is particularly appealing. We chose Nokia because of their commitment to the utility industry and because its solution portfolio incorporates microwave radio as a part of its end-to-end communications architecture for utilities.”

Network management provided by Nokia also simplifies the provisioning and troubleshooting processes across KCP&L’s IP/MPLS and microwave networks, he added.