Local Mobile Services – Switch on and forget
Background
In regional areas, many local residents had restricted or no access to learning facilities. In response to this, a council developed a mobile solution to reach out to the community – a single-deck bus to help the college reach out to those who have difficulty travelling to the campus or who may not have the confidence to enrol on a course. The council aimed to make computer skills accessible to all, irrespective of age, experience, and location. However, ensuring effective internet connectivity was always a challenge. The satellite solution they used was unreliable and expensive, and depended on ‘line-of-sight’ which restricted the locations the bus could operate from.
Journey
EMS proposed OptiBond to connect the bus’ 10 laptops as well as printers, monitors and a large LCD display for the tutor to demonstrate techniques. OptiBond maximised available bandwidth and provided 100% resilience by aggregating and balancing the combined internet access with additional low-cost DSL services and/or mobile SIMS. OptiBond enabled the council to easily prioritise essential applications through the strongest channels.
Outcome
OptiBond enabled the council to deliver services to the community in a reliable and cost-effective way. Because OptiBond is easy to set up, can be scaled up and down according to requirements, and did not restrict the location due to ‘line-of-sight’ conditions, the council continues to deliver valuable life skills to the community. OptiBond gives mobile libraries, health screening and other mobile council social services the ability to connect to the internet, and standard applications in the network. OptiBond overcomes the latency issues (lag / slowness) traditionally associated with satellite communications which means avoiding issues when running key interactive applications.
“OptiBond is working very well on the bus. It is a great relief that I do not have to worry about ‘line of site’ as we did with the previous satellite solution. We can now, generally, park the bus anywhere and still connect to the internet…..brilliant ! The performance is also superior to our old system. It is so nice to just switch on and forget.”
Current council customers include Warwickshire CC, London Boroughs of Barnet & Hillingdon. EMS created OptiBond which simultaneously bonds different cellular networks plus ADSL / satellite. OptiBond is a complete internet solution enabling up to six WAN connections and up to five concurrent VPN connections and operates as a local server to enable printing, file share & network connectivity.