PURPOSE AND SCOPE

Telecommunications and Business services for National Grid High Voltage electricity sites are delivered and supported through long-term contracts with service providers:

• The OPTel contract is for operational telecommunications services, also called OPTel services e.g. for tele-protection, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), Operational Telephony, Operational Data such as EDL, CNI Security (CCTV) WAN and for Business WAN including RAMM remote access at Substations. There are two OPTel contracts

1) The Managed Fibre (MF) contract for the fibre and 3rd party infrastructure connecting the sites, and

2) The Managed Services (MS) contract for the communications hardware, network management systems and overall service management.

Where the OPTel contract is referred to in this document this may be the MF contract, MS contract or both contracts. These contracts are delivered by the Operational Service Providers (OSPs).

• The Business Networks and Enterprise Services Contracts for Business Services e.g. LAN at Substations, desktops, printers and business applications. These contracts are currently awarded to Verizon for Business Networks, CSC for Desktops and Laptops, and Xerox for Printers. For simplicity this document will refer to Business Services and Business Service Providers (BSPs) should any of the suppliers change in the future. A Non Standard Service Request Form (NSSR) is used for these services.

This Transmission Procedure document sets out the process for forecasting, designing and procuring telecommunications services for National Grid High Voltage electricity sites and the roles and responsibilities of each group involved in the process. All project teams within Capital Delivery (CD) requiring telecommunications services are required to follow the methods described in this Transmission Procedure.

The process steps referred to in this Transmission Procedure align with those defined in TP500 (Network Development Process).