Basin Electric Power has signed an agreement with Aviat (News - Alert) Networks for its Eclipse Packet Node microwave platform as the electric utility gears up for replacing its existing networks in North and South Dakota.

Under the deal, Santa Clara, California-based Aviat Networks will roll out a replacement network based on the Eclipse Packet Node microwave platform, an enhanced Hybrid radio that supports existing TDM and future IP traffic in native formats.

The platform that Aviat is supplying is expected to upgrade Basin Electric’s 45Mbps infrastructure to 360Mbps throughput using the antennas of similar size. For Basin Electric, it was a long-pending dream to boost the capacity of its microwave network to cope with the rising traffic.

Aviat is dispatching a team of experts who will design and roll out the microwave network in North Dakota and South Dakota as early as the first quarter of 2013.

“The existing system does not have the bandwidth to carry the additional protective relaying, SCADA, mobile radio, data and voice channels to support system growth,” said Boyd Trester, project engineer with Basin Electric.

Trester believes that Aviat’s new  microwave radio system will have eight times the capacity of the current system.

Mandan, N.D-based Basin Electric caters to more than 2.8 million electric consumers and its service territory is spread across 540,000 square miles in nine states.

The network upgrade is expected to help Basin Electric streamline its operation and expand the service to newer areas in the years ahead.

“Basin feels that microwave is more reliable than ‘aerial’ optical fiber, mounted on electric transmission lines,” Trester said. “Optical fiber takes time to repair and put back into service. Microwave systems have a higher in-service rate and if they do go down, can be restored much more quickly in a crisis scenario.”

In other news from September 2011, Aviat Networks selected Parature (News - Alert) for online customer support, the company has announced.

Customers can now search a comprehensive Knowledgebase, full of useful articles for more than 36 products, and receive auto-suggested answers to their inquiries with Parature's EasyAnswer feature through Aviat Network's website.