Brisbane Skytower, the tallest building in this Australian city, relied in Huawei and Honeywell for the provisión of a Passive Optical LAN (POL) solution to achieve a smart network inside the building.
Brisbane Skytower is a 270-meter, 90-story residential tower. Located in Brisbane’s central business district, this iconic residential tower is now a smart building leveraging advanced technology solutions from Honeywell and Huawei to make it more sustainable, secure and energy-efficient, the two companies said.
Huawei and Honeywell highlighted that smart buildings are rapidly evolving to become more networked, human-centric and intelligent. The growing use of the internet of things, cloud computing, and big data enables seamless interoperability between building intelligence and information systems, changing the building industry and accelerating the development of smart buildings.
The network for smart buildings needs to keep pace with this new paradigm and be smart enough to connect people together, which needs to shift from simply providing telephone services to delivering all-round services such as Wi-Fi, and environmental awareness. Both Huawei and Honeywell noted that the network needed to tackle the following challenges:
-Higher bandwidth: A growing number of smart devices such as smartphones and 4K internet TVs are being used in buildings. Buildings are adopting more building control, energy management, and sensing equipment. All these bandwidth-intensive applications place increased pressure on overburdened networks.
-Ubiquitous network access: Occupants now expect anytime/anywhere access to applications and services in rooms, elevators, underground parking garages, etc. Property management owners also need a simpler, faster-to-deploy, and easier-to-manage network to reduce costs while improving efficiency.
These challenges were primary considerations for Billbergia Group, Skytower’s property management company. The group wanted a technology provider that could provide a comprehensive smart building solution.
In 2017, Billbergia Group approved Honeywell’s proposed technology solution integrated with Huawei’s POL solution, delivering a complete smart building solution.
Honeywell provided Skytower with its Enterprise Buildings Integrator, a building automation system that takes charge of system integration, covering the Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning, security protection facilities, etc. Additionally, Honeywell will centrally manage various building sub-systems, provide a visualized management portal and alarm management and work-order management services, designed to deliver efficient facility management, fast response, and predictive maintenance.
Under this smart building project, Huawei delivered the gigabit network and provided a POL solution to achieve smart network inside the Skytower. In contrast to a traditional complex LAN which limits the performance of bandwidth-intensive applications, using POL technology, an enterprise can combine data, voice, video, and other weak-current systems into one optical network, according to Huawei.
The deployment of Huawei’s POL solution enabled the building automation system to share the same network with triple-play services, eliminating the need to build standalone networks.
Also, one single fiber bears all services, simplifying cabling and reducing capital expenditure, the company said. Huawei’s U2000 centrally monitors the faults and alarms of all network equipment and provide added visibility to the end-to-end service rollout.
