School Board Solutions - Crystal Lake Case Study
Success Story:
Crystal Lake School District 47 deploys DragonWave’s AirPair Licensed Ethernet radio solution for high capacity and high availability backhaul for the school district’s backbone network.
Business Challenge:
Crystal Lake District 47 had been operating a multi-school network in rural Illinois. Recently, interference had drastically impacted the reliability of their backbone network which carries the traffic from multiple low capacity links to individual schools. This caused decreases in throughput and loss of connectivity in many cases. This, combined with increasing bandwidth requirements, well exceeded the capabilities of their low capacity unlicensed systems.
At the same time, the Crystal Lake District 47 network had been engineered primarily around data traffic, and any addition to this network required support and optimization for native Ethernet traffic.
Solution:
After careful evaluation with a Chicago based integration firm, Integrated Technology Providers, Crystal Lake District 47 deployed the AirPair 50 as a backhaul solution to provide a high capacity backbone between their main hub site and 3 schools to supplement their unlicensed low-capacity links. The AirPair solution was deployed in the licensed bands to eliminate any interference, providing a guaranteed high availability backbone network. The AirPair solution provided native Ethernet backhaul with <.5ms latency, enabling a wide range of services including Voice and Video over IP.
In addition to reliability and native Ethernet optimization, the AirPair 50 was selected for its high bandwidth capabilities. The AirPair 50 provides a committed information rate (CIR) of 50 Mbps full duplex. As well as the day one capacity, future scalability was a very important consideration throughout the decision process. To this end, AirPair was ideally suited, as it provided a remote, software activated upgrade to 100 Mbps full duplex.
This new architecture delivers several advantages:
Backhaul Performance: When using a 5.8 GHz solution, performance was drastically reduced by other operators in the area. By using a licensed radio solution, Crystal Lake District 47 was able to engineer a solution up to Five 9s availability and less than 1 ms latency, eliminating costly downtime.
Measurable ROI: Crystal Lake District 47 was able to establish a clear ROI. Due to the low-cost and scalability of AirPair, Crystal Lake District 47 was able to produce a 12 month or less payback period vs. alternative leased lines options.
Increase Capacity for Future Growth: By using the AirPair solution, Crystal Lake District 47 now has a network with over 90% more capacity than unlicensed alternatives, enabling their students and staff to capitalize on the growing need to use bandwidth intensive applications such as Voice and Video over IP.
Guaranteed Performance: By utilizing licensed spectrum, Crystal Lake District 47 is ensured 100% interference free operation.
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