Wednesday, October 25, 2017

26/10/2017: Advanced communications networks across Mexican fish farms

by InfiNet

Fish farming, or aquaculture, is rapidly becoming the leading method of satisfying food demands in today’s climate

Founded in the mid 1980s, Regal Springs was the brainchild of Rudi Lamprecht, a former United Nation aid worker who was looking for a sustainable food and protein source for the community of Java. 


  
www.infinetwireless.com
Today, the company has farms in Mexico, Honduras and Indonesia and exports to mainly US and European markets. All of the Regal Springs facilities are spread across Mexico and due to the remote rural locations of the farms and wide geographic expanse of the facilities, sustaining a robust communications network is challenging.

Due to the lack of fibre network coverage in rural areas, a heavy reliance on long distance fixed wireless broadband networks is a necessity, but Regal Springs’ existing wireless system was lacking in capacity.

This meant that the company was unable to transmit in real-time all data from the farms as well as surveillance footage back to the administration centre. Instead, Regal Farms had to download and send data manually by courier between facilities.

Cost-effective wireless
Regal Springs had previously installed several Point-to-Point (PtP) links with Cambium that linked their various facilities and offices, but this was not adequate for its growing needs and only achieved capacities of 20 percent of actual brochure specification.

This was a much lower capacity than what was required for the proper operation of communication systems between the farms and the various offices on the mainland. Regal Springs fish farms needed to find a cost effective wireless communications infrastructure that performed better than its current wireless network in a short time.

The system needed to work across large distances and rural locations, removing the manual processes of communication between all facilities and tackling some of the challenging environmental factors.

Essentially, Regal Springs wanted to end up with a single network providing video surveillance, voice and data communications between its production areas, administrative offices and packing plant, while keeping both capital and operational costs of the system to a minimum.

Regal Springs had looked to expand its existing Cambium network, but after talking to various system integrators, it decided also to look at other options that would future-proof the growth of its wireless infrastructure.

Mexico-based Inxite is a value-added integrator specialising in wireless communications, CCTV and infrastructure solutions, and introduced Regal Springs to the InfiNet Wireless brand. As a part of the initial proof of concept demonstrations, Inxite designed the network not only for optimum performance through the radio planning and network reliability, but also the environment.

As the farms were situated on open water they had to function via solar energy due to the lack of AC power sources close to the lake. The equipment also had to be able to withstand the harshest environments and be grounded to withstand the atmospheric discharges such as lightning.

The InfiNet system was selected following field trials and the final installation consisted of both Point-to-Point (PtP) and Point-to-MultiPoint (PtMP) solutions.


Read the full article, HERE.

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