Ensuring High Bandwidth SLAs for Oil Refineries

Tupras is Turkey’s largest industrial enterprise. The utility operates four oil refineries, with an annual total of 28.1 million tons in crude oil processing capacity. Activities within the refinery yards, in particular in and around the oil tank valves, must be monitored 24 hours a day using real-time high-definition video surveillance and recording technology.

“It’s not possible to trench for fiber optic cables within the refinery yards near the oil tanks,” explains Kaan Mutluel, Tupras’s veteran industrial IT manager. “The ground is too hard, plus there is always the risk that the fiber cables will be cut – and we can’t afford any downtime in this type of critical infrastructure operation.”

Mutluel searched for a robust, high-bandwidth wireless solution that would provide guaranteed SLAs per surveillance camera. Oil refinery tank yards are constructed in such a way that unobstructed line of sight is not always possible from every vantage point. This required the wireless solution to perform flawlessly in near line-of-sight conditions as well

Fast Rollout with High Reliability
Tupras evaluated a number of wireless options, but with professional guidance by Dengebir, one of RAD’s leading system integration partners in Turkey, chose RAD’s Airmux-5000 point-to-multipoint broadband access radios, which transmit over unlicensed frequencies and, therefore, do not require any broadcast license.
“We’ve worked with RAD for many years and have used many of their networking products in the past,” notes Mutluel. “They are very reliable – which is crucial for this type of environment.”