Kilostream alternatives in hostile locations

dave-lew99 · 1 Apr 2011 at 17:46

Hello, posting in here because it's an enterprise shaped problem...

A customer of ours is looking to reduce their expendature for a 64k Kilostream line they have with BT, we're also looking to increase capacity up to around 2 mbps.

The location is pretty remote (a cliff in Wales..) and in terms of connectivity there is leased line stuff from BT (Kilostream, Megastream) and ISDN (if you can still order those that is)

ADSL/ADSL Max is available at the exchange, but it's about 4 miles away. 3G is potentially an option.

What are your opinions on a system which is reliable most of the time - the current proposal we're thinking of is bonded ADSL from someone like Managed Comms (anyone any experience of them?) and keep the Kilostream line for backup. It's a constant stream of data so there can't be metered useage charges (per time or data unit).

dave-lew99 · 1 Apr 2011 at 19:20

By road the distance is about 100 miles, the current system is point to point, it largely doesn't matter as the other site has good connectivity (multimegabit MPLS system from NTL/VM)

What puts us off 3G is data charges and the fact it's not really that resilient, it is good in the fact that it's seperate from anything provided via a BT exchange (well as much as it can be)

We looked at wireless point to point links but sadly, we can't get the height - not without a absolutely massive tower, to negate the fresnel zone at that kind of range.

From site we're looking to get around 1.5-2mbits upload. Download can be zero for all intents and purposes as the data will largely be outbound only. If only it were possible to get ADSL the other way up (larger upload than download)

dave-lew99 · 1 Apr 2011 at 20:07

Rroff said:
If the exchange happens to have an LLU presence you could look at Annex M offerings tho at 4 miles probably not applicable.

Oh how we wish...

There is ADSL and ADSL MAX and that's it.

Bonded ADSL is probably the way to go then as we suspected. Do you have any opinions on Managed Comms as a company? Reading around it seems mostly good but some people have been quite upset (mostly that they can't read the contract and see that the one they signed was for 5 years...)

dave-lew99 · 12 Apr 2011 at 17:46

For those of you interested, looks like we're going to put in a 2-hop wireless link in a licenced/light licenced freq band.

We've got a good relationship with a company who specialises in this, previously we had ruled it out as we couldn't do it in one hop... then the customer mentioned they have another site with a massive tower on it!

Looks like we can quite easily get 40mbps for under £10k. It's likely we'll put in 3G fallback too, just in case.

The customer is keen to get away from BT entirely, citing reliability issues, but i'm unsure if this is a problem with another company simply blaming BT for issues they've had.

dave-lew99 · 12 Apr 2011 at 18:26

Will let you know when i can.

Our supplier is doing their own difficult maths for link propagation and so on, then they'll be able to recommend a product and estimate throughput and uptime stats.

dave-lew99 · 12 Apr 2011 at 18:32

Kit wise, we are a premier partner with Alvarion http://www.alvarion.com/ but this time we're looking at Infinet http://www.infinetwireless.com/ because they do MIMO to allow for path diversity.

dave-lew99 · 18 Apr 2011 at 14:41

At the moment the long hop (about 60km) isn't going to work with the normal kit we use and we're currently investigating proper licenced links (as opposed to light licenced).

If the wireless method will give us much greater bandwidth than is practically achievable to the site by cable then this is the route we're likely to take - simply because we can shunt so much more data.

For resiliency reasons we may choose to leave the kilostream line in - in these scenarios we can shunt the minimally required data for operation and that's OK.

Ultimately it's up to the customer to choose what they want to spend/save and their risk assessment will identify how important it is. The entire system (of which this is a small part) is only required an uptime of 99.9 and we'll still retain some functionality via a backup link of some description. Although if the area is as flaky as the customer says, then this may be over 3G. Even if it works 90% of the time it'll be of huge benefit.

Latency shouldn't be too much of a problem - it's a streamed data application where you interact with the data locally. Site wise, the middle hop is a proper radio/comms tower. We regularly use Alvarion kit for short hop links (around 1km or so) and we're well aware of the issues with rain fade and whatnot.

We're still in the investigation phase at the moment (for the comms at least) so no option is off the table entirely.