Case Study
How do you deliver resilient, accurate timing across substations, rugged sites and distributed critical energy infrastructure?
The Client
A major energy organisation operating a distributed estate of critical infrastructure, including substations, remote operational facilities and rugged sites.
The customer needed a resilient way to maintain accurate and consistent time across geographically dispersed systems, while strengthening its internal understanding of the timing infrastructure.
The Challenge
Modern energy infrastructure depends on systems sharing the same trusted reference for time. This synchronisation allows monitoring, communications and operational technology to accurately record when events happen and, critically, in what order.
Across an estate of substations and remote locations, this becomes more complex. Different environmental conditions, network architectures and dependencies on sources such as GNSS can introduce operational risk.
For the customer, inaccurate or unavailable timing could make event correlation and fault analysis more difficult, particularly when information from multiple systems and sites needed to be compared.
They therefore required a resilient timing architecture that could support rugged environments, reduce single points of failure and provide consistent synchronisation across the wider estate.
The Solution
edgeTime (Edge Networks) delivered the solution through a Timing as a Service (TaaS) approach.
Rather than simply supplying timing hardware, edgeTime worked alongside the customer’s technical teams throughout the design and deployment process. Our engineers provided specialist timing expertise, configuration and ongoing support, while the customer retained visibility and involvement throughout the project.
Training and knowledge transfer formed an important part of the delivery. This gave the customer’s teams a clear understanding of the architecture, equipment and operational processes, allowing them to confidently oversee and interact with the timing environment while retaining access to edgeTime’s specialist expertise when required.
The architecture considered the complete timing chain, including reference sources, GNSS, distribution, redundancy and holdover, helping maintain synchronisation if a primary reference became degraded or unavailable.
Substations formed a key part of the design. A common time reference across monitoring, communications and control systems allowed events from different systems to be accurately correlated, giving engineering teams greater confidence when investigating faults or network incidents.
For rugged and remote locations, equipment and deployment methods were selected around the environmental and operational requirements of each site while maintaining a consistent overall architecture.
The Outcome
Timing as a Service provided the customer with specialist expertise and ongoing support without removing control or knowledge from its internal teams.
By working collaboratively with edgeTime, the organisation avoided the need to build the same depth of specialist timing capability entirely in-house, while training and knowledge transfer ensured its teams retained a strong understanding of the infrastructure.
The project delivered:
- Resilient synchronisation across substations and remote sites
- Improved confidence in event sequencing and fault investigation
- Reduced exposure to GNSS disruption and individual points of failure
- Ruggedised infrastructure suited to demanding operational environments
- A consistent timing architecture across geographically distributed sites
- Training and knowledge transfer for internal technical teams
- Continued specialist support from edgeTime when required
The result was a more resilient critical infrastructure environment, combining the customer’s operational knowledge with edgeTime’s specialist timing expertise to create a solution that could be understood, managed and supported collaboratively.
*To protect customer confidentiality, this case study is anonymised. Client names, employee names, sites, suppliers and product references have been removed at their request.