Motorola PTP Connects Campus Sites

Weymouth College was founded in 1864 and today enrolls more than 7,000 students from the United Kingdom and around the world. Situated in South West England, Weymouth College’s main campus is in Weymouth with remote sites at The Mulberry Centre and The Redlands Sports Centre.

Weymouth College offers comprehensive educational programs in multiple areas of study, and leverages advanced technologies to enable campus-to-campus collaboration and remote learning programs.

The required connectivity to both The Mulberry Centre and The Redlands Sports Centre were found to be wanting due to the current Broadband VPN connection not providing the required bandwidth between their sites.

Also, it was found that to purchase a telecoms circuit was prohibitive. With new, higher bandwidth applications and more and more traffic passing over the lines, and with the requirement for Voice over IP integration Weymouth College required connections with higher throughput to speed communication between the sites.

Technical Requirements

• A minimum of 10mbps bandwidth required between each site to carry voice and data connectivity
• The solution needed to be easy to operate and maintain by the Weymouth College IT staff who needed full control of the wide area network (WAN).
• The links needed to be carrier-grade (99.999%), no exception, and be able to navigate around obstacles such as trees and buildings
• Highly secure signaling over the connections
• A flexible solution that could be re-located when needed.

Wireless seemed like the logical choice. However, the links were found not to have optical line of sight and therefore using FSO (laser) or other wireless alternatives was not an option.

Vietec were able to survey, design and test the links prior to final implementation and determined that both links could be achieved with the Motorola PTP 5.8GHz Wireless Ethernet Bridge with a bandwidth in excess of 10mbps. The final PTP platform came with integrated antennas for time saving and ease-of-installation. There were no towers or large antennae required; the PTP units were installed on TV mast-type poles.

The PTP links provided private, high-bandwidth carrier-grade network connections that created an extended LAN environment between all locations with the flexibility to move the network when any of the sites relocated. Vietec had the wireless links up and running in a matter of days, providing 99.999% (carrier-grade) availability across the paths obstructed with trees, buildings and terrain.

With the option of upgrading the PTP links either via software licensing or new hardware, Weymouth College could choose to upgrade the speed of the links at a fraction of the cost of a telco circuit offering comparable bandwidth.