ci connect | Issue 1
Going the extra mile
A story of flexible connectivity
It all started in Oxford, the city of dreaming spires. The first RedKite node offering fast and reliable wireless connectivity solutions to the city and surrounding area was installed in February 2005 on one of the college roofs. Companies were quick to take up the service as there was no alternative solution available in Oxford that could meet business’s requirements of affordable, highly available symmetrical bandwidth. Of course, as with all wireless technologies customers were concerned about the robustness of the technology in poor weather conditions. “Perhaps God was smiling on us the week after RedKite went live at Oxford Innovation,” says Graham McLean, Managing Director of CI. “Because it snowed really heavily and the service was completely unaffected – there’s nothing like being able to meet your customers’ worst fears.” Following on from this success the service, which can deliver speeds of up to 100 Mb with symmetrical uploads and downloads and uncontended capacity, is now live in Central London, Exeter and Hemel Hempstead and is about to be switched on in Harwell
Diverse Routing
Some businesses choose wireless connectivity not just because it is fast, but also because it can deliver a level of true resiliency. We all have a picture in our heads of the catastrophic effects that the loss of our Internet connection would have on our businesses – often the impact is immediate. Many organisations have already built in some diversity by using two network providers. Unfortunately although the lines might be independent they all too often come into the building at the same point and run on the same physical routers, firewalls fibres and exchanges – all of which become a single point of failure risk. SLAM, the digger cuts through both cables, CRASH the lightening takes out the whole exchange, OOPS someone unplugs the router. A wireless solution delivers resiliency by providing a diverse routing solution – the connection comes in via the roof rather than underground, is often made through a different Point of Presence and uses high speed wireless technology rather than fibres. “Lots of our customers have found this really useful,” explains McLean. “They can balance peak loads across all of the bandwidth available from the wired and wireless connections.”
By using active-active load balancing and an automated fail-over system both wired and wireless connections can be used together to provide optimum connectivity for everyday communication. This enables businesses to get the full value out of all connections provided to every location, not have fail-over lines lying unused until there is an outage. “Rather than leaving the back-up lines idle and crossing your fingers that they will work just when you need them, this set up means your back-up is being used every single day”, says McLean.
Tailored for our customers
Customers often need connectivity to be installed really quickly into environments that are not always easy to access, and there are plenty of solutions out there – ADSL, SDSL, wireless, Leased Lines, LAN Extension Services - just what is best for you? For sites where high band width is needed but a dedicated leased line would be cost prohibitive, CI has found that the installation of bonded DSL solutions can really hit the mark. “Through bonded DSL solutions, additional resiliency is built into the site’s connectivity, plus there is the obvious advantage of increased bandwidth with up to 3.2Mbps uplink possible from bonding four ADSL Max circuits” says McLean. CI’s RedKite Wireless solution is another way to deliver high-speed connectivity. If a RedKite node is already in place in the area installation can be as fast as 10 working days which compares with anything up to 65 working days for equivalent wired solutions. If no node is available then speed of installation will be determined by the availability of a suitable building or mast on which a new node can be installed. A recent project showed just how innovative you have to be sometimes. Construction company Watkin Jones was setting up a new construction site and was prevented from digging up the fairway on a neighbouring golf club which meant they could not install a phone line. The solution? Install a wireless link from the golf club house to their portakabin. Once they installed a PBX they could VoIP over it enabling them to use the data network for voice communications as well as Internet and email. “You really can rely on wireless connectivity to provide a high performance, cost effective alternative to Leased Lines and LAN Extension Services in a huge variety of situations,” confirms McLean.
Remote Solutions
One area that appears to be particularly troublesome for many companies is managing the communications between their remote offices. Some use additional bandwidth to funnel traffic through the Head Quarters link before passing it out through proxy servers to its final destination. “A complete waste of bandwidth says McLean. “Collocation avoids wasting bandwidth during site to site and site to Internet communication,” he explains. CI recently developed a solution for Edmund Nuttall, a leading UK civil engineering company, which incorporated many of these products into one seamless solution. The solution gave Nuttalls additional network capacity to cope with the increased frequency and size of data exchange, the ability for remote users and sites to access central resources and the robust encryption standard (AES) to provide additional security for data transmission between sites.
CI wants to provide totally flexible solutions to enable entire workforces to exchange information and access email and the Internet quickly and securely no matter where they are located. “We really will go the extra mile to find flexible, scalable solutions to connectivity problems which are not always available off the shelf concludes McLean.”