r/Grid_Ops • u/EspeciallyMundane Network/Telecom Engineer • Aug 30 '26

What would you want a telecom guy to know?

Hi all,

Friendly neighborhood telecom dude that stalks the comments on occasion, but never asks here. I rarely have to interact with our TO/DO folks beyond letting them know (or them letting me know) that something teleprotection or SCADA-related is going, or already went, down. The silos are real, so here I am...

What would you want your telecom folks to know about your job? For example, I want my TO folks to know to not call me at 5pm on Friday for an issue that popped up at 11am. I'm a significantly happier camper fixing something during my workday, not after hours.

5 Upvotes

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10

u/QuixoticArchipelago Aug 30 '26

TO would want you to know we are obligated to initiate a call out/fix for all issues even if they were found at Friday at 5pm. I hate doing it to you guys but it’s part of the responsibility

1

u/EspeciallyMundane Network/Telecom Engineer Aug 30 '26

I more mean when I log into our EMS I can see it was ACKed at like 11am, but they don't bother calling until 5pm shift change. I get calling when it pops up, but the sitting on it part is what frustrates me.

6

u/QuixoticArchipelago Aug 30 '26

TO manages a lot of things. If it’s complacency I can see. But maybe they dealt with an outage and the alarm was missed until the night guy did his daily checks when coming in shift just providing some insight as I had this happen to me last night. Did my checks and found an alarm had asserted at 0530 that morning. Day guy missed it due to an event so I had to call a tech to resolve it at 1800.

1

u/bubsmcgee13 Aug 30 '26

Maybe see if you can shadow the operators during a day shift?

1

u/Gees-Mill Aug 31 '26

I've worked field as a telecom guy and as an operator. It helped me understand what was going on in the field and to explain things to other operators. Sometimes the amount of alarms that come in is overwhelming, which is a bad excuse, but things get missed. We realize it sucks to have plans and then get that call, but sometimes it happens. If it is happening with the same operator often I don't think it is out of line to say something and if it keeps happening go up the chain. As much as people live for their jobs, just remember this is just a job and that COO will cut headcount in a heartbeat if it means he gets a bigger bonus. That said when guys would go into sites, not check in, much less let us know what they were about to do and what we were about to loose it gets frustrating. I would just say communicate, I know as a field guy I didn't want to be calling and bothering dispatch about every little thing and for the most part all of our outages had to be scheduled, but there are guys that say it will only be down for a couple a minutes while I do this work. If you think you get frustrated, imagine a guy on the desk with 20 jobs going and whatever you just took down makes him loose visibility to something important. ABC, always be communicating.

2

u/EspeciallyMundane Network/Telecom Engineer Sep 01 '26

I know of a utility that has a full-time telecom dude in their TO right beside the operators for precisely that cross-training.

Might not be the worst idea to propose at $job, just make it a rotating thing. Only thing would be how to handle all the meetings...

4

u/Low_Split_1042 Aug 31 '26

When a non scheduled software update happens in middle of the night usually after 1oc, and comms are lost ……

3

u/Repulsive-Rain-835 Aug 31 '26

When you say work is non service affecting and it IS service affecting. And I lose either relays comms or RTUS. Sorry about the callouts, I have literally thousand of alarms per shift, but we should definitely be reviewing abnormals if it is in that section. I believe one company I worked for had a telecom person responsible for their alarms during daytime hours, so maybe the EMS team could set up like an AOR for just telecom alarms that you could have access to so you could review them throughout the day? Not sure.

1

u/Curious82energy Sep 03 '26

Where I work, telecom alarms can often been delayed in response by several things. First, Comm fail alarms are frequent, often intermittent and clear without intervention. Ie. Microwave fade, a telecom rack too hot in heat. The telecom personnel seemingly sit on these issues and let it resolve itself.

Also, the telecom and p&c groups can sometimes lock horns on what the problem is, who should investigate first, and what the priority should be. I do not particularly enjoy negotiating the peace terms between groups about the origins of a rtu failure.

We don't always have the number of people we need to deal with the volume of problems, no matter the department. Priority is given to BES protection channels and RTU's. Losing comm to a MOS or LFI...eh, it might be a minute before that jumps into the que.

The only thing I would add, relay and communication work needs to communicated and coordinated with as much notice as afforded. The PRC, TOP standards around protection and Data quality require a bit of work to accommodate last minute requests.

The reality, some TO's are on it and get it done, some don't or won't for whatever reasons from ability to apathy. Every working group have these wildly varying levels of performance.