WiMax-ready business continuity comes to Birmingham

“Bandwidth hungry businesses that cannot risk losing their Internet connectivity can use the service as a backup to their existing wired connection, because it provides a totally separate, high performance wireless Internet link,” explains Graham Mclean, managing director of managed WAN provider CI-Net. Its RedKite ‘leased line in the sky’ WiMax-ready Internet service already covers a 10km radius around central Birmingham, with wireless base stations transmitting symmetric, uncontended bandwidth for subscribers to pick up using outdoor antennae. Mclean believes that most network managers recognise they can get extra resilience by using multiple service providers, but says: “If you go for multiple wired services, this only covers problems that happen within individual service providers’ environments. “You’ll still lose connectivity if there are problems in your communications room, along the ducts routing cables to your buildings, or in the local exchanges used by all service providers. “Because we offer ongoing load balancing between the two connections, we ensure that customers will get value from both. Our ‘always on’ arrangement means they have the peace of mind of knowing that RedKite is fully operational all the time – able to kick in automatically if there is any problem with the wired connection,” he adds.