Connecting a growing subsidiary in the utilities industry
“The service has been absolutely brilliant – we’ve had no troubles at all. It was a smooth install, and the high-speed connectivity has been a real game changer.”
John Topliff, Site Manager for CBUL, Horsham Treatment Works
THE CLIENT
Browne Construction
THE NEED
Cloudcell Technologies were recently approached by Browne Construction. They are a company who, like many other successful construction businesses, are discovering the importance of maintaining growth in their IT and communication services. They described to us their almost-constant need for increasing levels of bandwidth. Be it to support security systems, internal communications, or just the general digitisation of their day-to-day operations. They’d found challenges in finding the connectivity to support these requirements – especially on sites in more rural or remote locations. One of their ‘problem sites’ belonged to one of their subsidiaries – Cappagh Browne Utilities Limited (CBUL).
THE SOLUTION
Following a brief remote evaluation of the site, the following problems were made clear:
- Traditional, fixed-line connectivity would not be possible without incurring huge wayleaves.
- Business-grade levels of throughput were absolutely a requirement here, to support security measures, including CCTV, and operational management of a large-scale, long-term site contract.
- Due to the infrastructure around the site office, and the metal structure of the office itself, the low-gain 4G ‘dongle’ that was currently being used for connectivity was providing extremely weak performance; not at all fit for purpose, and also not capable of supporting the aforementioned security devices.
The problems seemed to all be solvable through our Cloudcell EQ managed service. The issues facing CBUL are all too common across the construction, utilities and maintenance industries – and the Cloudcell team of engineers have become experts at providing business-grade solutions to fix them.
In the case of Cappagh Browne Utilities, the team did just that. After a series of detailed network tests using a Poynting high-gain Omni-directional antenna, the engineers on-site found a series of LTE / LTEA frequencies across Multiple networks that delivered excellent throughput, and ‘clean’ noise & latency profiles.
After consulting with the CBUL site manager, the engineers underwent a professional installation, mounting the Poynting antenna externally to the cabin, and cabling the connection back to one of our high-performance LTEA-capable routers, for the strongest possible signal.
THE OUTCOME
The site manager, and site operators, were delighted with the solution. When compared to the previous ‘4G dongle’ product they were using, the difference in performance was night-and-day.
Not only was the raw performance affected, but the Cloudcell EQ service is capable of supporting a large number of additional functionalities, including remote desktop access, live remote CCTV monitoring, and device-level traffic management. The solution is also a scalable one. Should the CBUL site complex expand in size or have an increase in user demand, the engineers at Cloudcell will only be a phone call away from catering to the site’s changing needs.