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Zetron’s Acom Advanced Communications System adopted by British Airways
Zetron has been awarded a contract to support the expansion of British Airways’ system from 39 to 82 operator positions.
Zetron, Inc., has announced a new contract to support the expansion of British Airways’ communications systems at Heathrow Airport. British Airways began working with Zetron in 2005 when the airline chose to implement Zetron’s Acom Advanced Communications system—an integrated communications system (ICS). The Acom system has worked well for British Airways and continues to evolve. An expansion of the system is planned for this year.
Zetron’s Acom Advanced Communications system is a fully digital switching and multiplexing system that represents state-of-the-art technology in console dispatch for mission-critical applications. Acom’s end-to-end digital architecture integrates voice (radio and telephone), data, paging and video (via LAN/web browser) to provide unmatched flexibility and ease of use.
An Acom system can range in size from a few dispatchers operating in a fixed or mobile environment, to more than 100 operators located in centralized or distributed communications centres. With Acom, communications centers located in different geographical areas can be networked to provide distributed switching and wide area control for improved efficiency, greater operational effectiveness, maximum security and reliability.
The design of British Airways’ expanded system will include a distributed architecture, with call processing distributed between two separate sites for system resilience. In addition, each site’s equipment will be fully redundant, with changeover to the back-up equipment occurring automatically in the event of any component failure.
The process of designing and adopting the Acom system included a close collaboration between Zetron and user groups at British Airways. Zetron worked with British Airways’ user community to solicit information about each user group’s operational requirements to ensure that these requirements would be met. These requirements were incorporated into the system that was implemented. The system is now being used to manage some functions of British Airways’ Operations and Customer Service groups at Heathrow.
This year, British Airways plans to move its Airport Control group from their present location into the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow and the Operations group to the airline’s Waterside headquarters. The number of operators will increase from 39 to 82. Because all communications in the new Terminal 5 building will take place over the airline’s IP network, the connections from the operators positions have been converted to IP for transport to the central switch sites. Because bandwidth is at a premium in any IP network, Zetron’s solution employed sophisticated compression algorithms to reduce the bandwidth required to transport the signals between the operator positions and the central switch sites.
"Thanks to Acom’s flexibility, the system could be modified and adapted to meet these new requirements," said Zetron President, John Reece. Zetron is proud to have been awarded a contract to support the expansion of British Airways’ system from 39 to 82 operator positions.
