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Ask the Expert
Q: We have a client in our recovery site in Ennis who is
considering mirroring data over a wireless link. How reliable are
these links? - Paul O'Brien, Managing Director,
WARS
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| Peter Hendrick, Technical Director,
AirSpeed Telecom |
A: Licensed wireless networks, properly designed, can and
do deliver 99.999% availability, backed up by SLA. There are
four key things to remember...
Planning, planning, planning: You won't get these high
availability levels unless your provider's radio planning
engineers, who design your link, have the right tools and the right
expertise. Make sure any provider you're considering has experience
in assessing, testing and pre-qualifying paths over the kind of
distances and terrains you're looking at, whether those are
point-to-point or point-to-multipoint paths. The reliability of
your network is down to the signal quality over the link -- and
signal quality is always governed by the engineering practices
employed in the design stages of the network.
The carrier's choice for carrier-grade traffic: Licensed
wireless comes with an excellent pedigree for reliability -- it's
the choice of the police, military and emergency services
worldwide. Plus, the world's biggest mobile operators have chosen
it for backhaul to their own backbone networks. Outside the telecom
industry, there are a growing number of companies using licensed
wireless for business critical applications.
Available, whatever the weather: It's important to realise
that rainy weather does not affect the availability of a
well-designed licensed wireless link. A well-designed link has a
power range -- this allows the connection to maintain its full
integrity even if the signal decreases to the lower end of the
range. Again, proper planning is vital here. The design process
ensures that the power range takes into account the rain profiles
for Ireland.
Line of sight is fundamental: We've all heard of wireless
ISPs who insist that line of sight (LOS) isn't necessary for
delivery of a broadband signal. Don't confuse these solutions with
proper, point-to-point and point-to-multipoint licensed wireless.
Wireless networks that claim to function with no LOS or near-LOS
are typically DSL-type, best-effort technologies with availability
levels that may fluctuate widely. A reputable provider of licensed
wireless enterprise networks will only build your network on
pre-tested, clear and stable line-of-sight paths. So you get a
licensed wireless network that can boast measurable, SLA-backed
availability levels, and fully support your enterprise
applications.
Got a question? All queries answered by Peter Hendrick,
Technical Director, AirSpeed Telecom. Questions may be edited for
brevity. Email to newsletter@licensedwirelessnews.ie
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