Overview
India has the world’s second largest telecommunication network. The major domains of telecommunication in India are Internet, Telephone, Television broadcast with flourishing sectors of digital exchanges and signalling gateways. Telecom industries have brought socio-economic upliftment of India with its connectivity network and has also imbibed transparency in many public sectors with the help of e-government platforms. There are many telecom industries which contribute trillions to India’s revenue. These telecom providers/operators work in a peculiar fashion and have huge infrastructures, operational and fuel costs.
Problem Statement
There are multiple operators which have or share the same infrastructure for the installation of their active equipment, the cost of operation and installation usage gets divided between themselves. The billing is done on a monthly basis and carried out by the site managerial company or provider. To calculate the monthly billing for each site, manual processes, or billing systems from other industries are employed to cater tower billing needs. The process of billing is split up as i. Energy Billing and ii. IP Billing. Energy Billing includes billing of the C Energy utilized by each operator. DC billing methods are very few and lengthy leading to cumbersome calculations and invoicing. This is an expensive, time consuming and error prone process.
Present Scenario
At present, the billing methods are manually devised. Measurement devices with lower accuracy are installed at different operator sites, which only measures the voltage and current values, these are manually noted by site engineers and fed into a centralized system where energy value for the amount of usage by operator, is calculated. This method of manual insertion might lead to inaccurate calculations as there is no automation involved. It also leads to long billing cycles.
Solution
- It is essential to use a measuring instrument capable of measuring DC energy. The source of input to these active equipment are AC-DC converters i.e. Rectifier units.
- Multiple telecom operators install their active equipment on the same tower, a measuring device which can measure DC currents of different loads or channels (active equipment) will reduce the billing time and cost of installing many measuring devices
- The voltage of these towers is same hence, 1 voltage channel DC measurement is required.
To cater all these needs, Rish EMDC can be used effectively with its features as stated below.
Key highlights of the product
- 4 Channel current input, 1 channel voltage input
- DC current measurement using shunt inputs
- Communication capable – Modbus RS485 to communicate data to centralized system of the billing site/provider
- 4 relay outputs which can be programmed via Modbus, effectively used to cutoff energy provided to an operator when its energy usage exceeds more than sanctioned requirement
- Enabled data logging for quick retrieval of past data
Working
As shown in the diagram below, the AC-DC converters or rectifiers are used to provide power to the telecom towers for their operation. In order to measure the consumed energy by each operator, shunts (act as input to DC Energy meter) are connected in series with the individual channel and the mV drop is measured. This gives the amount of load consumption. Voltage is the same for all the channels, only the current changes according to the load connected.
If a consumer utilizes more energy than sanctioned, the electricity provider can cut-off supply to that individual operator using relay provided in the meter. The data is logged in the meter’s memory and can be used for record & report purposes.
Benefits
- Multi-Channel Support : Single meter measures energy consumption of four independent loads connected to one Voltage source
- Data Logging : User Selectable parameters (1 to 30) can be logged at regular intervals (1 to 60 min) with Date & Time stamp in internal memory and can be accessed via Modbus
- Bi-Directional Voltage & Current measurement : The meter has a unique feature of measuring both charging and discharging current
- Relay Functions : Relay can be activated & deactivated at predefined ON & OFF Time on any or all Days of the week or using thresholds
