Empresas Públicas de Medellín ESP (EPM) is an energy sector company responsible for generating, distributing, and commercializing electricity and natural gas in Colombia. The company’s network operations center (NOC) in Medellín monitors and maintains these services. EPM remodeled the NOC to improve technicians’ ability to quickly view real-time data and images from various secure sources on a videowall. Ensuring signal integrity and system reliability was crucial.

The audiovisual system needed to send content from the workstations to the 3×1 videowall and a 55-inch display mounted on the back wall. The system was designed to display content from multiple sources simultaneously or allow a single image to fill the entire videowall. Switching between sources across various window layouts had to be instantaneous and seamless. Additionally, the control system required intuitive touchscreen operation.

EPM brought in integration firm Ultimate Technology to help design the system, which uses Extron’s Quantum Ultra processor to drive the videowall.

At Ultimate Technology, we recommend that our customers use Extron equipment for their audiovisual integration installations because of its quality and durability.

EPM’s NOC technicians monitor the components, servers, and endpoints associated with the country’s electrical power grid and natural gas resources. They use their workstations and the content sent to the 3×1 videowall to analyze and help identify events, faults, flow patterns, and deviations from each system’s baseline functions. The videowall system is essential for daily operations and vital during situations that could lead to service disruptions.

The NOC includes three workstations in a command center layout and an adjacent equipment room known as the Crisis Room. Each workstation has two HDMI outputs. Signals are converted for transmission over the CAT 6 cable infrastructure to the Extron Quantum Ultra 4K videowall processor, which is rack-mounted in the Crisis Room. The signals are converted back to HDMI for processing.

The Crisis Room desk includes an Extron Cable Cubby enclosure, providing AV connectivity for mobile devices, such as a field inspector’s tablet or smartphone.

The Extron-engineered Vector 4K scaling engine built into the Quantum Ultra processor scales 4K/60 video and graphical content for the 3×1 videowall and the 55-inch display. The processor accepts two HDMI transmissions from each workstation and delivers multiple source signals to the displays over the twisted pair cable infrastructure.

This processor model was chosen for its appropriate size, scaling quality, 400 Gbps video bus, and durability. It is equipped with Quantum Ultra 4K HDMI input and DTP output cards. The processor upscales and downscales the source content without affecting image quality or detail. The video bus handles high-resolution content while maintaining various source refresh rates. The videowall processor’s open card slots are available for future system expansion with additional sources or display devices.

Here’s the full case study: https://www.extron.com/article/EPM-Energy-NOC