Background
The construction industry often operates at remote, temporary, mobile, or new locations at short notice. Secure instant office environments with full data connectivity that are quick to setup is vital, particularly during the early stages of a contract. Installing landlines is time and cost prohibitive in remote, temporary, or new locations such as construction or civil engineering sites. Additionally, the latency issues associated with data satellite channels can mean real issues running mission critical interactive applications.
Tarmac, a leading UK construction company, had won a large tender and were contracted to resource a key project in 20 locations. Tarmac provides cement & lime, aggregates, ready mixed concrete, asphalt & road surfacing, maintenance services, and recycling, and needed access to secure VPN at the 20 remote sites to carry out the contract.
Journey
Tarmac deployed OptiBond which addressed the issues of maximising available bandwidth and 100% resilience by aggregating and balancing the combined internet access, with additional low-cost DSL services and/or mobile SIMS. OptiBond enabled Tarmac to easily prioritise critical applications such as VPN, VoIP etc. through the strongest channels. The automatic failover/back feature means if one channel goes down, internet will always be available.
Outcome
EMS OptiBond was deemed preferable to alternative 4G router and satellite based solutions based on cost, time to deploy and performance. OptiBond bonds multiple data channels to provide a secure, resilient data feed and solved connectivity issues throughout all sites in a cost and time-effective way. OptiBond enabled Tarmac to scale up and down quickly and provides superior resilience and performance compared to other router solutions as it offers the ability to bond two data channels together. The OptiBond units can additionally be configured to support a secure VPN link and provide added value functionality including print server and traffic shaping / optimisation capabilities.
“We liked the fact that EMS had a clear focus on construction industry requirements which was reflected in both the OptiBond product and in the support and logistics available from EMS. Technically the resilience and performance available from OptiBond was superior to other router solutions as OptiBond offers the ability to bond two data channels together. Our OptiBond units can additionally be configured to support a secure VPN link and provide added value functionality including print server and traffic shaping / optimisation capabilities.” Lee Beech, IT Infrastructure Manager, Tarmac
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.