As the largest telecommunications service provider for Portugal, Altice wants to guarantee its customers maximum quality of service throughout the year. When a technology upgrade was needed for its Global Operations Center (GOC) in the city of Lisbon, Barco’s LCD video walls and networked video wall controllers perfectly met the requirements of the Altice Portugal team.
Altice Portugal is the largest telecommunications service provider in Portugal. Since 2015, the company has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Altice Group, a multinational cable and telecommunications company.
Altice Portugal’s GOC in Picoas, Lisbon, is used to monitor, manage, and supervise all infrastructure related to mobile and fixed telecommunications, including satellites and submarine cables. In case of network congestion, it is at this center that the problem is detected, and resolution begins.
New LCD video wall
The GOC in Lisbon has room for more than 100 operators whose responsibility it is to monitor network performance and resolve network issues in time. To make sure operators, GOC technicians and team managers have real-time, up-to-date information at all times, the center had been previously equipped the control room with a large
video wall consisting of rear-projection cubes provided by multiple vendors.
But when the center’s video wall technology reached end of life, the Altice Portugal team had to look for an upgrade. They found this with Barco.
“We were looking for an effective display solution from an established and reliable brand, and for expertise of an experienced integrator,” says
Fernando Almeida Teles, Head of Service Operation Center at Altice Portugal. “We found this combination with Barco and its Portuguese integration company Casa Serras.”
The installation of two new Barco video walls, consisting of 55” OverView KVD LCD panels in an 8 by 3 configuration, was finalized in May 2020. Altice Portugal was impressed by the Barco video wall’s color uniformity and valued the solution’s economic performance in terms of energy consumption.
Shorter maintenance interventions
For a control room that is designed to monitor network performance 24/7, it was critical for Altice to have a video wall they could depend on.
“With the Barco KVD displays, Altice Portugal expects to have much more time between failures compared to the previous, discontinued video wall technology from multiple vendors, and consequently much less required for maintenance issues,” says
Fernando Almeida Teles.
But when an LCD component does need to be replaced, the KVD video wall has a number of features to limit downtime to a minimum and to speed up servicing. For example, the input boards and power supplies can be quickly removed from the display, so they can be easily maintained or replaced.
Swift video distribution
To quickly resolve issues, Altice Portugal also needed a visualization solution that made it possible to smoothly share and distribute video and other content across the GOC facility. The Portuguese telecoms operator therefore relied on Barco’s Transform-NSD video wall controller and NGS-D320 Pro encoders, which make it possible to capture and display content from anywhere on the network and display it in high resolution on a video wall in any configuration or layout.
The video wall content can also be shared on a dedicated touch-enabled display in the GOC’s crisis room, which makes it possible to smoothly interact with the video wall content through touch. This way, Barco’s video wall controllers enable collaboration and content sharing with customers, partners, and other stakeholders who need 24/7 availability of status information on networks and services.
