NEPTUNE Canada

NEPTUNE Canada's Port Alberni shore station was purchased from Teleglobe in 2004. This building, which was originally built for the TPC4 trans-Pacific telecommunications system, provides reliable power and shore-side communications connections for the subsea network.

This facility, with its large climate-controlled equipment room, backup generators, reliable power and high bandwidth communications can be used to support additional collaborative science activities. Already, NEPTUNE Canada is hosting a UNAVCO strainmeter in a borehole on the site. In addition, NEPTUNE Canada is in discussions with the Geological Survey of Canada to locate a seismometer and GPS station at the site; other programs may also be supported in the future.

Power

BC Hydro is providing a 500 kVA service to the shore station. The largest consumer of power is the Alcatel-Lucent power feed equipment, which will supply up to 16 amps at 10,000 volts to the submarine cable. When outages occur, a UPS will supply power from batteries until one or more of our three back-up power generators start up. These back-up generators can be used to power the network until power is restored.

Communications

Shore station communications equipment include:

• Alcatel Ethernet Service Switch router
  • manages data flows between the shore station, local DMAS and our University of Victoria facility
• Alcatel Omniswitch ethernet switches
  • provide traffic aggregation, network protection and data traffic management
  • 10 gigabit/second connections between redundant stacked switches
• Alcatel Metrospan SONET optical transponders
  • telecommunications grade equipment for long-reach optical transmission
  • provide two communications paths (clockwise and counterclockwise) for each node (if the cable is severed, signals can still flow in the other direction through the network)
• wave division multiplexing systems
  • transmit multiple optical signals on a single fibre pair using multiple independent wavelengths (colours)
  • each node uses a different wavelength of light; all are sent to each node, but filters are used to select the desired signal at the node

Data Management and Archive System (DMAS)

Data collected from our network's sensors and instruments are archived in a large database system called DMAS. This system serves data to scientists via the Internet from our headquarters facility at the University of Victoria, but a backup archive system is also running in our shore station as well.

Learn more about DMAS.