MSS install brings 145 sites on air

Ericsson, along with the ASP's AVC and Beacon Communications, have successfully delivered Nortel MSS 7k nodes into four remote BSC sites at Costessey, Cardiff, Carmel and Plympton - providing transmission capacity for 145 10:10 sites to be brought on air.

This was a superb achievement and involved a lot of behind the scenes work by various departments within Ericsson as well as the ASP's. The installs were all completed within an eight week period from the design hitting the table. A lot of hard work was done and many hurdles were overcome by the project team to achieve this fantastic milestone.

Cardiff and Carmel were particularly tricky as they were brought on-line using novel methods which the team had to develop from scratch. This included working out a deployment strategy and bringing the node on-line using a live traffic cut-in.

Outstanding support

Dean Chappel from Ops is to be thanked for his endless patience and outstanding support in getting these nodes under management using a temporary 2Mb/s circuit. Dean had to talk Beacon engineers on-site through the script loading as this was first for them also. Bryn Welch then produced some complex circuiting plans which made a spiders web look like a straight line! The out-of-hours live cut-in actions required personnel to be on site at the node and the switch at Bristol as well as dedicated Ops resource in Reading. Again Dean Chappel provided the support to the Beacon engineers and the cut-ins were successful. In Carmel this also involved bringing up a BT high-capacity circuit supporting 16 sites. This too was done successfully.

A big thanks to the following people: Andy Hibberd (Design) Dean Chappel and Mark Seguna (Transmission Ops) Barry Costello and Jamie Pearcey (Deployment) Dave Harrington and Bryn Welch (Circuit Prov) Frank Robinson (Project Management) Dave Parker and his team (Beacon Comms) Richard Cutting and his team (AVC) Dan Finn (permits and site access) Maria Nikolopoulou (Design) and Peter Smith of MBNL for having faith in us.