The invention discloses a design method of wide area operation and maintenance architecture of substation automation equipment. The design method comprises a step of establishing an information highway capable of freely transmitting various application data between a primary site and each subsite, wherein the information highway comprises a public service layer, a universal service layer, and an application service layer, wherein the application service layer is located at a primary site side, the remote operation and maintenance on the public service at a substation side is realized through a dispatching data network and a remote operation and maintenance system at an application service layer remote operation and maintenance center; the remote operation and maintenance system at the primary site side adopts a service-oriented application mode, and retrieves a communication service, a model service, a pattern service, a point table service and other like content of each substation at the substation side based on a remote interaction technology of the universal service, thereby realizing remote awakening, remote resetting, forward table configuration, secondary equipment state index monitoring and diagnosis and other like integrated remote maintenance on a substation communication gateway machine, and further realizing forward table monitoring, channel and message monitoring, remote desktop and other like remote running control functions.