Wireless Warriors

Integ fires up school WLAN

When Sydney Anglican boys’ school Trinity Grammar wanted to link its Summer Hill and Strathfield campuses it turned to integrator Integ Communications Solutions to install a cost-effective wireless solution.

More than five kilometres separated the two campuses, which hold 1900 students, and the existing telecommunication costs were out of control. “We previously had a 1Mb/s Telstra DDS [digital data service] link, which was expensive and had insufficient bandwidth,” says Evan Hughes, director of IT at Trinity.

“We were considering line-of-site wireless but would have had to put a 15-metre mast on one of the buildings and that wasn’t acceptable to the local Council. So then we were introduced to near-line-of-site technology, where we didn’t need to put a high mast on either campus and we were able to get a 35Mb/s link.” One of the immediate benefits was having no recurrent costs apart from maintenance on the equipment.

Chee-Nung Wong, regional account manager data networking for Integ, says Trinity was specifically looking to get voice communications and applications between the two sites, and to be able to do that with reliability and to control costs.

“This was a bit of a step in faith for us to consider a non-line-of-site product,” Trinity’s Hughes says. “What sold it for us was that Integ did a trial.They tested it and could actually prove that it worked.”

Wong says in the planning and engineering stage of any wireless link it is important to step through the motions correctly. “And step one is to do an ROI analysis to prove to the customer that there is a sound ROI argument for swapping from a carrier and buying their own wireless hardware infrastructure and installing that.”

The integrator also completed a radio frequency site survey where it went out to the customer site to fully understand the specific site requirements in terms of cabling and installation, and the difficulty and suitability of the technology. It tested the link running so they were able to draw performance data off that to prove to the customer what throughput could be expected over that specific link and over that specific geography.

“We installed Orthogon Gemini system. Price-wise, Orthogon is comparable to other systems. There’s a new class of Orthogon -- Orthogon Spectra 300 -- which is a very exciting product. It has data rates going up to 300Mb/s. So if you can do that wirelessly, you’re really looking at almost a carrier-class product,” Wong says.

Hughes says it cost about $35,000 to install. “And the maintenance costs are about $3000 to $4000 per year and that’s relatively minor when you consider we were paying $20,000 a year for the [old] DDS link.”

Hughes says the actual installation process was relatively straightforward, once they got through the headache of getting Council approval to put up a 2.5-metre antennae mast.

“It took about a week from when they installed, getting it working, and all the testing before going live with it. We kept the old existing link still going as backup until the wireless link was up,” Hughes says. The benefits were immediate. The new wireless link was a 30Mb/s link, 30 times the data throughput rate of the old system, Hughes says.

“From an IT management point of view we have now got a lot more remote control over machines and that makes things easier. We’ve increased the bandwidth available to the kids and staff on both campuses and they can do a lot more web-based activities with the better bandwidth.”

He says there is also faster and more reliable access to admin systems for all electronic reporting and Trinity also runs VoIP over that new wireless link for all intercampus conversation.

“In pure financial terms the payback is 18 months, but I’d say it’s a lot quicker than that when you consider the additional functionality we’ve been able to get out of the increased link.”

“It’s harder to put a price on improved educational experience the kids can have because their internet works faster, or the teachers can get their reports done quicker, or the improved staff morale: a whole lot of intangibles that you can’t put a dollar figure on. It has immeasurably proved itself,” Hughes says.

And after only six months in operation, Hughes says there has already been interest from other schools.

Integ’s Wong says the key things to ensure a smooth wireless integration are to demonstrate ROI when looking at technology or carrier alternatives, to complete an RF site survey and in some cases provide a link test with specific equipment over a specific site.

“The third thing is to make sure you have a good relationship of trust and credibility with your customer so that they trust your ability to be able to install this link for them.”

Wireless is a huge growth area, he says, both wireless LAN and wireless point-to-point and WAN. “There’s a lot of new opportunities out there as we wrap our brains around the new capabilities and solutions we can deliver,” he says.