Kilostream alternatives in hostile locations

[dave-lew99]

Hello, posting in here because it's an enterprise shaped problem...

A customer of ours is looking to reduce their expendature for a 64k Kilostream line they have with BT, we're also looking to increase capacity up to around 2 mbps.

The location is pretty remote (a cliff in Wales..) and in terms of connectivity there is leased line stuff from BT (Kilostream, Megastream) and ISDN (if you can still order those that is)

ADSL/ADSL Max is available at the exchange, but it's about 4 miles away. 3G is potentially an option.

What are your opinions on a system which is reliable most of the time - the current proposal we're thinking of is bonded ADSL from someone like Managed Comms (anyone any experience of them?) and keep the Kilostream line for backup. It's a constant stream of data so there can't be metered useage charges (per time or data unit).

 

[Rroff]

4 Miles probably won't be too much of an issue for ADSL tho you won't get more than 5Mbit/s or so... more concerning could be throughput on the backhaul from the exchange - some out the way ones don't tend to have a huge amount of capacity and often its strained already.

If they can get a 3G signal then it might be worth looking at one of the ADSL routers with failover 3G port - should be possible to get a reasonable enough dataplan to cover emergencies at a lot more cost efficency than a kilostream line - aslong as theres ok 3G coverage should manage around 400-600kbit/s average on that.

 

[Trifid]

You can still order ISDN circuits either a 2e or 30.

Are you looking for a point to point connection (if so what is the distance?) or one to the internet (possibly with VPN?).

 

[dave-lew99]

By road the distance is about 100 miles, the current system is point to point, it largely doesn't matter as the other site has good connectivity (multimegabit MPLS system from NTL/VM)

What puts us off 3G is data charges and the fact it's not really that resilient, it is good in the fact that it's seperate from anything provided via a BT exchange (well as much as it can be)

We looked at wireless point to point links but sadly, we can't get the height - not without a absolutely massive tower, to negate the fresnel zone at that kind of range.

From site we're looking to get around 1.5-2mbits upload. Download can be zero for all intents and purposes as the data will largely be outbound only. If only it were possible to get ADSL the other way up (larger upload than download)

 

[Rroff]

Yeah wouldn't use 3G as main link, but you can get some fairly reasonable priced plans for emergency backup useage now if required which should be a lot lot cheaper than kilostream and ADSL should do for the rest.

If the exchange happens to have an LLU presence you could look at Annex M offerings tho at 4 miles probably not applicable.

 

[Trifid]

If the exchange happens to have an LLU presence you could look at Annex M offerings tho at 4 miles probably not applicable.

I get 1.6Mbps when I am 1KM from the exchange. Is SDSL available? Again not sure if the distance will be too far for 2Mb but worth looking into.

For point to point, 100 miles is too far for a BT LES circuit. You could see how much Virgin National Ethernet will cost at your chosen speed.

 

[dave-lew99]

If the exchange happens to have an LLU presence you could look at Annex M offerings tho at 4 miles probably not applicable.

Oh how we wish...

There is ADSL and ADSL MAX and that's it.

Bonded ADSL is probably the way to go then as we suspected. Do you have any opinions on Managed Comms as a company? Reading around it seems mostly good but some people have been quite upset (mostly that they can't read the contract and see that the one they signed was for 5 years...)

 

[dave-lew99]

For those of you interested, looks like we're going to put in a 2-hop wireless link in a licenced/light licenced freq band.

We've got a good relationship with a company who specialises in this, previously we had ruled it out as we couldn't do it in one hop... then the customer mentioned they have another site with a massive tower on it!

Looks like we can quite easily get 40mbps for under £10k. It's likely we'll put in 3G fallback too, just in case.

The customer is keen to get away from BT entirely, citing reliability issues, but i'm unsure if this is a problem with another company simply blaming BT for issues they've had.

 

[s0ck]

I'm interested, more informations pls

 

[dave-lew99]

Will let you know when i can.

Our supplier is doing their own difficult maths for link propagation and so on, then they'll be able to recommend a product and estimate throughput and uptime stats.

 

[dave-lew99]

Kit wise, we are a premier partner with Alvarion http://www.alvarion.com/ but this time we're looking at Infinet http://www.infinetwireless.com/ because they do MIMO to allow for path diversity.

 

[#Chri5#]

Are you working with 802 Global? I was going to suggest them but wondered if you are already speaking to them as they handle Alvarion and Infinet.

 

[ThorpedoUK]

Sounds cool!

I too would be interested to know how it goes once you start putting it together, pics?

 

[blueacid]

Dot folder - I'm curious!

I guess you couldn't go wrong to have an ADSL backup line instead of 3g; I would imagine that to be cheaper than heavy 3g use. Some ISPs (I believe IDNet for one) offer unlimited upload still on their download-limited packages; something you'd probably want.

 

[Skilldibop]

That sounds perfectly feasible.
I've got backup links to a 100mbit LES (that were originally the primary link) running somwhere between 7.5 and 10mbit throughput using Motorolly PTP series radios. That particular link is 26km but it's having to bend around docklands which takes some of the grunt out of it.

They are also mounted on poles on our premesis roof, if you could relay off a proper radio mast then that would drasically increase your range.
But the company that installed ours reported a 125Km single span running at a couple of Mbit.

From experience, it's absolutely doable.
But... Things to be aware of, weather and air/ antenna conditions can reduce throughput so your performance can literally change with the wind. You'll also get a pretty high latency off a two hop link like that, though probably not much worse than a 64k Kilsosream, and definitely better than IPSEC over 3G.

Good luck, look forward to seeing the results. 100miles is a long way, be good if you can pull it off

 

[bigredshark]

The ISP part of me says it sounds like E1 time, prices are very reasonable these days and comparable to decent SDSL offerings last time I looked. It's got the advantage of being fairly universally available as it's just an ISDN30 tail at the end of the day.

Reliable in use too, still far superior to any DSL based solution in that regard which is why we still use a lot. We had a nice solution with VM where they delivered channelised E1s over an STM1 at our regional pops which saved on datacenter terminating gear for us. I mention this because they might be able to bridge it into a vlan and deliver over existing MPLS connection if you have them already. Technically this is easy, I've done it dozens of times but whether VM can (be bothered / summon the necessary clue to) do it is an entire other question.

We spent time with wireless but I've never been happy using it on a link where we'd be obliged to pay service credits for downtime, it's not that reliable yet (and likely never will be...BT pulled their internal radio/microwave backhaul links for a reason...)

 

[dave-lew99]

At the moment the long hop (about 60km) isn't going to work with the normal kit we use and we're currently investigating proper licenced links (as opposed to light licenced).

If the wireless method will give us much greater bandwidth than is practically achievable to the site by cable then this is the route we're likely to take - simply because we can shunt so much more data.

For resiliency reasons we may choose to leave the kilostream line in - in these scenarios we can shunt the minimally required data for operation and that's OK.

Ultimately it's up to the customer to choose what they want to spend/save and their risk assessment will identify how important it is. The entire system (of which this is a small part) is only required an uptime of 99.9 and we'll still retain some functionality via a backup link of some description. Although if the area is as flaky as the customer says, then this may be over 3G. Even if it works 90% of the time it'll be of huge benefit.

Latency shouldn't be too much of a problem - it's a streamed data application where you interact with the data locally. Site wise, the middle hop is a proper radio/comms tower. We regularly use Alvarion kit for short hop links (around 1km or so) and we're well aware of the issues with rain fade and whatnot.

We're still in the investigation phase at the moment (for the comms at least) so no option is off the table entirely.