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icTrack is the organisation that owns owns Victoria’s transport land, assets and infrastructure. With much of its asset portfolio dedicated to transport — land, infrastructure, trams and trains, and telecommunication networks — its focus is on strategic asset management and supporting the delivery of better transport solutions. As asset manager and a provider of core services to the transport sector, it fulfils various roles and functions to ensure the assets serve Victoria now and into the future. It has three specialist delivery groups — Property, Telecommunications and Project Delivery — which are supported by Communications & Engagement and Business Services.
and emergency repair and maintenance, to ensure the highest standards of reliability for the transport system,” he added. Central to the Telecommunications Group’s mission is its Network Management Centre (NMC), located at Docklands in the heart of Melbourne. VicTrack established the NMC towards the end of 2008 — with staff operating the centre from Monday to Friday, 9 am to 5 pm — and transitioned to a 24/7 fully manned operational centre by December 2009. More recently, an opportunity arose to upgrade the centre and its facilities. “We were expanding our office space at VicTrack’s headquarters in Docklands, incorporating another level of the building into our tenancy,” said Moore. “This gave us the opportunity to relocate the NMC into a
INSIDE VICTRACK’S NMC
Seven days per week, 24 hours per day, Victoria’s transport infrastructure is safeguarded by a state-of-the-art management centre.
Jonathan Nally
VicTrack provides telecommunication infrastructure and services to many customers, such as Public Transport Victoria, Metro Trains Melbourne, Yarra Trams, V/Line and NTT-DATA (myki ticketing system), as well as other government agencies and some non-government entities. “As a licensed telecommunication carrier, with network infrastructure that spans the state of Victoria, we provide a full suite of telecommunications services to the transport and government sector,” said Bruce Moore, general manager of VicTrack’s Telecommunications Group. “We design, deploy and deliver network infrastructure solutions to support telecommunication outcomes, and provide business communications, security surveillance including data services and hosting for our customers. “We provide 24-hour network management and monitoring, including planned
6 Critical Comms - Sep/Oct 2017
new location in the building and incorporate updated technologies.”
Communications systems The NMC is responsible for monitoring power failures, communication line alarms (such as bit errors, framing errors, line coding errors and circuits down) and other performance issues that may affect the network and have an adverse effect on VicTrack’s customers and users. The NMC currently provides 24/ 7 network monitoring of all of VicTrack’s telecommunications network, including data storage and data monitoring. Some of the infrastructure and technologies monitored and managed include: • fibre and copper networks • SDH (synchronous digital hierarchy) and PDH (plesiochronous digital hierarchy) networks
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