Hello, everyone. Uh, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
I am Abdullah Lanezi, IT project manager in Saudi Aramco.
Aramco is the largest, uh, oil and gas company in the world,
and recently was, uh, listed in the stock market.
And in this presentation today, I will talk about how private FTE 450 make.
Could digitally transform the business in oil and gas,
especially at remote wells.
Before uh going very deep in the presentation, I would like to shed some light on
uh the private LTE roadmap in Saudi Arabia.
And uh we'll start by just uh for those who doesn't have a background about uh the
regulator in Saudi Arabia, which is CITC stands for uh Communication and Information Technology
Commission. And this organisation is responsible about
regulating and managing radio frequency uh for all users in the kingdom.
And uh part of their ambitious plan to enable digital transformation for all critical sectors.
Uh, they have a plan to, uh, licence and assign a private LTE for 50
MHz for critical users, including oil and gas, utilities,
and transportation.
And as everybody you know, the telecom operator nowadays is moving from low frequency band to a
higher band for to enable 5G and deploy, you know, uh some of the high speed connectivity.
And this will leave the 450 megahertz band uh free to use.
And the industrial company.
Now can use this free band.
To deploy and operate and build a specialised trade unit network to support their
applications, mission critical applications that require a connectivity that uh
cost effective and reliable.
A private LTE in Saudi Arabia, the plan to be awarded for nationwide
organisation that provide the connectivity for all industrial users.
Those users can be companies from the energy, oil and gas,
petrochemical, from the utilities, electricity company, from the industry,
the manufacturing and construction, or critical infrastructure in general.
Whether airport or or railway.
The main driver for this initiative, which is led by CITC.
is to have all those users who have a common need for a mission critical applications.
To be hosted in one single platform.
And provided by a nationwide network of provider.
The second pillar The fact that when those beneficiaries sharing the same
platform. They can help each other to accelerate the race
toward digital transformation, meaning if there is a company introducing new use case,
this could be spread out in the industry, all verticals, and easily can be adopted by others.
So this will increase the utilisation of the DT use cases and its application.
And improve their technology.
The third point, the fact that the band 400.
It's very congested.
And uh current Saudi Arabia, we have around 120 private radio mobile network,
and those networks are fragmented.
Each network has its own licence and run by different users.
And they are located for some reason in certain areas in Saudi Arabia,
which is the eastern province of the kingdom, because there is a heavy business at that area.
And when the network is congested, this might lead to interference.
And when you have interference for a mission critical services.
You might degrade the quality of the signal, uh, and in fact,
you know, services that cannot tolerate any interruption or uh service uh uh
downtime. The fourth point to ensure the needs are met
for all users, all those users, industrial users, require a high reliability,
high security, high availability, and resilience connectivity.
And the last pillar.
is to make sure that this service is provided for those industrial users an affordable
and reasonable price.
We have seen many use cases, especially for me as a person came from the oil and gas business.
Excellent use case application. You can deploy it and achieve with cost saving
or improve efficiency and optimisation within your business,
but unfortunately because the connectivity is very costly.
The cost exceed the benefit and you cannot have it economically visible and implemented
within your organisation.
We believe if we manage to govern, which is through CITC effort to put a price cap for
this connectivity, we can encourage and introduce more use cases and accelerate the
digital transformation and the industrial sector.
The private LTA 450.
As uh facilitating the DT uh uh and, and the verticals and the industrials.
And there are some applications is expected to benefit from this band.
Uh, I listed some of them, uh, and the list can be more than this,
but, uh, the industrial internet of things is one of the candidates to be hosted in this
platform. Smart sensors, mission critical communications
with voice or video.
And Skar remote terminal units.
And from this context, Saudi Aramco, they collaborate with
CITC and Nokia.
To conduct a proof of concept.
to test the privateity 450 megahertz and one of the remote tools in Saudi Arabia.
To just realise uh the value added from unleashing this month,
uh evaluate the economic and technical visibility for deploying uh this solution.
We mentioned that the 400 meg is congested.
And this is some statistics to share with you, to just imagine how this brand is really
congested and uh establishing a nationwide uh company serving all industrial sectors
is the key solution. More than 120 private mobile radio network now
we have in Saudi Arabia with more than 1000 licences issued for each single entity.
And this definitely uh very hard for the regulator to manage and might,
you know, trigger a risk for the users and be prone to interference.
And from the buyer chart, as you can see in the screen, majority of those users,
mission critical users, oil and gas, transportation, uh,
manufacturing, construction, utilities.
And uh all of them considered industrial users have the same need and require the same
data requirements in terms of security and availability.
According to the ITC plan, the band 450 MHz will be
awarded in 25 meg bandwidth blocks.
Uh, to support, uh, uh, both services, uh, narrow band and the broadband.
And this is a game changer for us in oil and gas business.
Because we have a lot of remote wells, oil and gas wells,
currently, without communication or with very limited communication does not allow us
to deploy some of the sophisticated, you know, solutions and applications that we have in
the market. The journey will start by taking us from manual
operation, which is most of the sites that we have within our company.
Uh, are operated manually in which you need to send the operator to the field to collect the
field measures, send it back to the control centre, process it,
and then you decide you might send it later, OK, to make some corrective action.
This process, which is the manual operation, is very costly and not efficient.
We believe that private LTE will take us from the stage to another stage,
which is real-time digital review.
From your control centre, from your work station, you can't access.
Uh, the site and collect the field measures and have a better understanding for
the site condition.
And ultimately we reach to a stage where the site will be fully and digitally controlled.
Uh, through the AI and through the fast connectivity that private FTE will leverage.
And we believe that private is extremely important for business considered
scattered like oil and gas.
We have walls everywhere in the middle of the desert and very hard to manage them without any
connectivity. Also, the utilities, the electricity company,
they have, they share the same pain. They have out of sight and require connectivity
to manage them and operate them.
A private LTE 450.
Uh, will enable uh industrial users to enhance productivity, efficiency,
and ensure safety and security within their facility.
And this is due to the main features that the privateity can provide fast and reliable and
secure connectivity.
It could support both voice and video.
And we believe that private FTE in the near future will augment the tetra.
And the B 25, but ultimately we replace them.
Due to the wider bandwidth that the private FT can provide.
Uh, and the, the, uh, more application can support.
Also, unlimited scale can support, you know, AI, VR, and other uh application can
support it with the 5G.
For the sake of the experiment that we did in the field,
we have considered 3 main use cases.
Those two cases, we believe it's essential for our operation and that's why we put it part of
our scope for. The first one is critical communication.
Push to talk and push the video.
Uh, currently in Saudi Aramco we have the tetra system which supports only push to talk.
We believe we believe that push to video is essential and important.
Sometimes you send the technician to the site and still you need the technician to coordinate
with an expert located in different geographical location.
And you cannot send, you know, both the expert and the technician to a technical issue you
have in the site.
We believe the video will uh uh optimise the cost for the company.
And achieve a cost avoidance uh for uh troubleshooting and maintenance activity.
In addition, the second use case is the video surveillance, CCTV camera.
And this will help us to provide a situational awareness about the site.
From your office you can know the site condition.
Uh and those assets, you know, that located in the remote was expensive,
you know, and in the middle of the desert and located in rural area,
anybody can access them.
So you need a camera.
At that site, so you can, you know, detect any suspicious behaviour.
And bring it to the security or the operator's attention to intervene and make things right.
Also during, you know, troubleshooting or any uh maintenance activities,
those camera is very helpful to monitor the progress and uh provide support and timely.
The third use case here is the well head automation.
And this is one of the, you know, specific use case that's heavily related to our business.
We believe a private LTE will take the remote from the manual operation
to the full automation and autonomy.
Because you can connect the remote smart sensors.
Uh, that will measure the gas, the the transmitter level,
uh, the gas leak, and all these field measures uh will be sent in a timely manner.
To the base station, to the operator, processed and based on the results and the decision of
the software, you will make a decision whether you shut down the valve or keep it.
And this slide I will just uh share with you the high level of a private architecture that
we adopted in the experiment.
Uh, we deployed the FTE core and the FTTE core was connected through Aramco
transmission, uh, network to the FTE EOB.
And basically the Eo B is a base station and the outdoor transceiver run unit.
Those two components were deployed in one of the communication uh building called Delia.
And we have to choose this site because it's at the middle of many several remote wells
and an excellent candidate site to test the technology uh and
uh you know, cover all the sites at the area.
At the remote, well, we have uh installed uh LTECP customer premise equipment.
Because the remote sensor does not have a wireless interface.
So from that, you know, uh, point, we decided to install the private uh LTE CPE at the remote
to to support Sca uh RTU uh CTV, uh, camera, and other
equipment. And the solution was provided by Nokia.
We used a system called NDA, Nokia Digital Automation cloud.
Uh, to, to provide, you know, services, connectivity services,
and the system equipment as well.
Just a closer look to the main components of the core.
The core contained the MME, which is the mobility management uh entity.
That handled the exchange of the signalling between the car.
And uh the base station and the end user equipment.
Also, it has the uh serving and uh data package gateway combined together.
To provide the the data traffic uh connectivity internally and with external
network and work as a forwarding router.
Also, it has the the home uh subscriber uh server to host the user uh related and
subscriber related information.
Uh, those devices uh was deployed in Aramco.
And we'll show later with you the location exactly on the map.
Before we run the experiment, we did some other of study.
To envision how the network can cover the area.
And according to our study, the majority of the sites are covered with a throughput
from 200 megabits per second to to more depends on the
location of the site and how it is far away from the base station.
And this is, you know, really, uh, confirm with our assumption that we built originally that
the private LTE can provide uh a massive uh area coverage.
For sites located in the yellow and uh Uh, blue, uh, they have this uh through
but. 1 megabit per 2nd and 0.5 megabits per second
respectively. In addition to the mission critical push to
talk and push to video.
We deployed smart sensors at the remote well.
And this is the diagram uh for the interface between the smart sensor and the
ATECPE. Those sensors to measure the gas leak,
the pressure, and the level of transmitted oil and gas.
And sent back to the control centre and based on the field measures,
the valve would will be uh uh whether you know, shut down or will be kept uh as it is.
And we believe this will optimise the cost for us and instead of sending someone to the site,
now this can be done autonomously, automatically.
You don't have a human to intervene and make a decision.
Also, you know, the remote will In case you didn't make a decision in a timely manner,
it could, you know, cause damage to the facility.
And it might cost the organisation, you know, some money to fix it.
This is the 3rd use case, and we have deployed in the remote worlds because we believe those
assets are expensive for the company and we need a camera to protect them.
So each one is a plan to be equipped with the CCTV camera.
The CCTV camera might be.
accompanied with AI to detect any movement, suspicious behaviour.
And accordingly, the operator will be alerted.
If any of these, you know, uh, risk flagged to make things right.
As you can see here in the screen, uh, from the dashboard, you will have a holistic view for
the remote will. You can see what is going on at the site.
You can know the, the, the remote condition.
The status of the radio handheld.
And also the status of the valve and the pump.
In one single platform.
In this slide, I will show you the location of the base station that we have deployed,
which is located in Edelia site one.
And the remote will is 15 kilometres far away from the main base station.
And we believe this is very long distance for a wireless connectivity to provide.
And the privateity is the, the best technology for such,
you know, scattered business and scattered worlds located in uh rural areas.
The polygon parameter for the coverage was around 160 kilometres.
And the height of the tower was 50 metres.
During the pilot, we have considered uh some uh success criteria and scenario to follow to
evaluate uh the uh proof of concept.
The first test was to test the network capability and the procedure that we followed
is to measure the uplink and downlink speed.
Latency and gender.
Also, we tested the bandwidth utilisation, basically through showing the amount of data
sent and received. Over the wireless link.
And since the push to talk and push to video, one of the use cases that we expect to be
heavily used, we devoted uh a test procedure for it.
And the procedure we followed is to make video and audio calls between 3 handhelds at the same
time. And monitor them for uh uh a decent amount of
time. And the last test is to Uh, measure the network
performance through uh monitoring the video streaming latency within the network.
All those uh test cases was conducted successfully with no failed case,
and we kept the network up and running for 7 days just to simulate a normal and real uh
field situation.
The overall system health can be monitored and uh checked through the dashboard.
From the website application, you can learn the status of the connected uh core.
And the radio, the remote radiohead.
Which is as shown in the screen is connected and up running.
Also the speed for the downlink and the Ali And number of configured SIM
cards uh for the system, which is here 24 and 4 out of them was uh connected.
And we took, you know, to screenshots for the performance of the system.
Just for the sake of demonstration.
Here you might notice the uplink and down link is around 0.5 and 1 megabit
per second. And this is attributed to the site location.
The site that we have chosen is 15 kilometres from the weigh station.
Which is aligned with our original assumption.
From the dashboard as well, you can configure the SIM card.
And you can add the specific IP address or dynamic.
You can determine the quality of the service for each SIM card.
And for the sake of the experiment we use the 5 SIM cards,
3 of them for the push to talk and push the video.
One of them for the CCTV and the last one for the sensors.
And this slide I'm sharing with you the configuration that we uh deployed for the
experiment. We used an antenna that supports 2 X uh and 2
RX. And aggregated total power was 80 watts.
The technology supports FDD.
With a bandwidth limited to 1.4 megahertz.
Based on this experiment and the results that we shared with CITC,
CITC decided later to increase it to 5 M.
And uh in this uh experiment, we deployed the 3 radio sectors to support the
360 view and coverage.
And the tower height, as we mentioned, was 150 metres.
We conducted a drive test.
To measure the signal strength at the area.
And as you can see here, the throughput is fluctuating from 6 MB to 1 MB.
And this is a proportionally uh directly related to the distance of the remote.
For wheels located within 3 kilometres, they can enjoy a throughput of 6 megabits per second.
And as you get further, the robot will start slightly decrease to 4 me
till 2 and 1 me for sites located 18 kilometres far away from the base station.
And this is really align with our assumption that one single tower
can support a massive area of coverage.
And this is definitely a technology that has a superior advantage.
In terms of cost of deployment in which you only need one tower to deploy the technology,
and when you minimise the number of towers, you minimise the cost of the maintenance,
the cost of the operation.
And the overall cost will be also optimised.
Also, the private LTE uh has uh another, you know, advantage and uh.
Uh, supporting the remote sensors are deployed at remote wells in which the signal
penetration is very excellent.
And this will help, you know, limited power sensors located in uh uh rural areas
uh to uh extend the life cycle for them.
Uh, in summary, I would like just to give a takeaway messages from this experiment.
That private LTE is a dedicated wireless technology.
Uh, support and designed and flexible, uh, to help industrial users,
and it could provide and offer things public network cannot offer.
Also, the 450 megahertz will become more available and more ready in the future
once everybody starts to adopt it and the ecosystem reach to a maturity,
and this cannot be done without an extensive effort from the manufacturer,
from the users, from the service provider, and of course the regulator.
Private LTE is proven that it's to provide a large network connectivity.
Uh, and coverage with a lower deployment cost and operational costs and maintenance.
Also, it has a main features that the technology can provide a high security and
reliability and resilience.
for critical users.
Last point is that the 450 megahertz is driven by the standard to support the current and
the future communication requirement for industrial users.
By this, I conclude my presentation. Thank you for your listening,
and I will be glad to answer any questions if you have.
Yes, go ahead. Timeline
Uh, OK.
Go ahead. Yeah, my question is about the timeline.
When do you expect this licence to be granted uh from CITC for this 450 megahertz?
OK, thank you for the question.
Uh, your question, when do you, uh, uh, when the 450 will be awarded and the provision for
industrial users.
Uh, first of all, I'm not entitled to answer some question like this because this should be
answered by the regulator, but according to the yesterday session.
Uh, it was mentioned that it's a plan to be uh available for industrial users,
uh, next year, uh, end of the second half, OK, middle of the next year.
OK, thank you. So.
You know, OK, so, uh, what I have seen here, you are covering that mostly the
oil wells, but what about with the offshore? Do you have,
uh, been like working in this part, or you have, I know that offshore sometimes is facing some
challenges. OK, yeah, uh, thank you for your question.
We have considered the remote wells because currently they have no connect connectivity
means. While, uh, offshore wells and rigs, they have
uh fibre optic cable, uh, underground.
Uh, also some of the rigs in the offshore already equipped with the VSAT.
So we have chosen this area because it has no connectivity and this scattered,
uh, actually in, in the south area that we did the pilot,
we have more than 1500 will.
In that area only. So, uh, from that, you know,
uh, perspective, we decided to do it in that area, but definitely privatility is applicable
for remote ways offshore and inshore later once we uh acquire the frequency and uh
deploy it. Any
questions? OK.
Thank you for joining me in this session.
I appreciate your time and have a good day.