BBC Radio with "Dual Self-Healing Star" routing system.
Lawo audio matrix in Broadcasting House covers all radio programmes.
BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) headquartered in London, UK, is the biggest public broadcast station worldwide. The BBC transmits TV programmes BBC One and BBC Two as well as six digital TV channels. Furthermore, they provide numerous analogue and digital national and local radio stations.
Time schedule and background
The National Radio headquarters of the BBC in London is housed in Broadcasting House which was built in 1932 and has listed building status. The main part of the inner building was renovated from 2000-2005 and new offices and studios were built.
The control room housing the existing routing system was in a 1950’s extension building behind Broadcasting House. This had to be demolished to make way for part of the new building hence a completely new routing system had to be installed.
The tender for the installation of a central routing system was published early 2002, in the same year the contract was concluded. In cooperation with the BBC the routing system was designed precisely to the requirements of the client so that it could be build up in several steps. The FAT took place in 2004 followed by the delivery of the system to site ready for installation. In 2005 the last changes and additions were made and a training session was held. In May 2006 the whole system went into operation and has been live 24 hours a day ever since.
The main partner for the project was Lawo´s distributor in the UK, Preco Broadcast Systems Ltd.
Customer's requirements
BBC had a clear idea about the requirements of the system.
- A capacity of at least 8000 Inputs and 5000 outputs, with a mixture of analogue and digital signals
- Resilience and redundancy were crucial
- Highest possible availability
- Maintenance and configuration must be possible whilst the router is live
- Ease of future expansion
Lawo's solution
Lawo supplied two Nova73 HD in “Dual Self-Healing Star“ (DSHS)-architecture. This DSHS-solution offers 9960 mono equivalent inputs by 4480 mono equivalent outputs, in a mixture of analogue and digital. The DSHS structure ensures maximum resilience and full redundancy. Due to the system architecture maintenance and upgrades are possible even during operation.
Convincing benefits
Besides all technical parameters, the Lawo system was a successful tender due to its cost effectiveness.
Satisfied customers
The BBC Project team are very pleased with the resilience, reliability and capacity offered by the DSHS-architecture and are convinced that the decision to use a Lawo system was the right one.
Serge Auckland, then Preco's Technical Sales Director, was very impressed by the solutions Lawo developed to meet the BBC's requirements, 'The Lawo router is a beautiful system with state of the art reliability. The very elegant "self-healing" Dual Star architecture is ideal for the project.'
Background: „Dual Self Healing Star”-structure
The “Dual Self-Healing Star" (DSHS) concept is based on a structure of two or more Nova73 HD routers. The interfaces are provided by DALLIS I/O frames which are connected via optical fibres. Fitted with redundant master cards, each one of them is connected with both system cores. However, in contrast to a classical dual star structure there exist additional mirroring lines between the system cores ("interstar links") that represent the additional and crucial redundancy level of the DSHS: this unique feature facilitates that in the event of a fault (e. g. broken fibre) the I/O frames are switched independently from the system cores. This is why within the DSHS the switch-over between the cores is only necessary if a central error occurs in a core.
The DSHS concept:
