Washington Gas, a wholly owned subsidiary of WGL Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: WGL), and Alcatel-Lucent today announced that Alcatel-Lucent has been selected to build the utility’s new communications network linking Washington Gas operations throughout Washington, D.C., and the surrounding region.
Alcatel-Lucent’s comprehensive leading Internet Protocol/Multiprotocol Label Switching (IP/MPLS) solution will support Washington Gas in making better use of its existing infrastructure and enabling more efficient delivery of natural gas to the company’s more than one million residential, commercial and industrial customers in the greater Washington, D.C. area.
The new network will support mission-critical utility applications and data requirements throughout Washington Gas’ service territory. For example, this new high-speed network will be able to monitor the company’s 12,200 miles of pipeline, checking for any disruptions and alerting management immediately. The network also will enable Washington Gas to continue to evolve its internal data networks to ensure customers natural gas delivery when they need it, at the most economical price and highest reliability possible, while reducing its carbon footprint.
“Migrating to all-IP is a significant part of our next-generation network, which will enable us to better manage our piping infrastructure to ensure more reliability, safety and cost efficiency,” said Mr. Orlando Spencer, Project Manager and Communications Architect for Washington Gas. “The Alcatel-Lucent IP/MPLS solution plays a key role in our strategy, which includes continued service delivery improvement as well as support for critical applications such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA).”
Deployment of the network is scheduled to begin this year and continue into 2011.
“Utilities worldwide are transitioning to IP/MPLS because it is the only technology capable of supporting all levels of mission-critical communications requirements of utilities on a single communications infrastructure,” said Walt Paskowski, Vice President of Sales for Strategic Industries.
