Redundancy is a necessity and not a “nice to have”

Lately, we have been getting more and more urgent calls to fix/solve damaged/interrupted critical connections. This year alone there have been several fiber cuts (e.g. a fire in a care home which damaged the local infrastructure and a ship collision). Both are examples where after the incident, the company was no longer able to operate. Similarly, yesterday morning the connection between 2 branches of a hospital was interrupted.

One of our partners was contacted by #AZ Turnhout to ask whether they could provide a quick solution. They immediately thought of their regular supplier of wireless data connections. In the morning, the first 802 Networks team was sent on site to carry out a site survey between the 2 branches. Once the line-of-sight between the sites had been clarified, they started the necessary cabling work and the schedule of 2 other technicians was rearranged to prepare the installation of the radio link. Not just any connection was suitable, as the customer specified that it had to be a real fiber replacement. The choice was quickly made to use the #Intracom Telecom Ultralink-GX80 for this setup. Which has a throughput of over 7 Gbit Full Duplex and response times lower than those of fiber. By 10PM, the connection was up and running with a measured speed from firewall to firewall of about +7.5 Gbit. The work included the site survey, 300m of new cabling to the roof, welding of the fibre-optic cable, installation of mounts and wireless units (using the required rope techniques), fine-tuning the wireless link (a real achievement, as it was already dark) and performing necessary tests by our team to result in the hospital being fully able to resume their operational activities. It is worth mentioning that there were only 12 hours between the initial phone call and getting the hospital fully operational again.

Only with a passionate team, tons of experience, the necessary stock and the right technical in-house resources can an emergency operation like this be realised in such a short span of time.

What should readers of this article take away from this urgent project?

– Know that 802 networks is available 24/7 and can always provide a solution through your regular IT partner;

– Consider establishing a worthy redundant connection. It makes no sense to have redundancy with insufficient capacity to take over the primary connection;

– Think twice about a redundant connection.  It is incoherent to use 2 different operators if their fiber infrastructure runs through the same route in different places.  Don’t be fooled by the fact that they leave on the other side of the building. Experience tells us that they may come together later;

– Know that nowadays high speeds are also available for wireless solutions and this with response times that are lower than with fiber. Moreover, the operational cost of these wireless connections is negligible compared to the monthly operator costs.