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The process of elimination provides a good solution - Technology Information

Communications News - August 1, 2000

Microwave winds up being the perfect fit for school district.

Kevin Little, director of facilities management and technical support for the Lafayette, IN, School District, was looking for some type of cost-effective solution to "wire" the district's WAN/LAN together between its two main buildings and the 14 outlying schools. The solution to a connectivity problem like Lafayette's is a growing concern nationwide as more districts and businesses seek to connect all their campuses and remote offices and share not just data, but also video, voice, Internet, distance learning and videoconferencing.

What Little initially wanted to do was create a link from the main administration building to the maintenance facilities center, a distance of just under two miles. The district had already investigated many options, including leased lines such as T1s and frame relay. There were two problems going this route: one was the amount of throughput that would be required, both then and down the road; and second was the recurring monthly expenses. The state of Indiana requires recurring monthly expenses to come out of the school district's general fund, a fund used mostly for salaries. Taking away from this fund would require major budget considerations.

Then, fiber was considered, but ruled out as too expensive an option when the district started calculating ripped-up streets and rights of way. "It would have bankrupted the corporation," says Little.

The Layfayette district first turned to wireless with spread spectrum. What the schools got instead of a running link was, according to Little, a "major disaster," partly due to installer error and partly due to the specific amount of data needed from the system. The system would not hold up to its needs without losing data. Little learned about Southwest Microwave through the Internet and wanted to know if the company could help with its offering of 10 Mbps of data at full duplex.

Microwave can connect remote sites from several hundred feet up to 20 miles and more, but most applications fall under seven miles. A typical microwave system consists of three major components: an indoor interface unit that connects to the network, a radio unit and an antenna. The indoor unit has an interface to the LAN and operates generally as a simple LAN transceiver interface, but may also offer bridging or switching/routing functions. The radio unit is usually placed outside near the antenna or may be attached directly to the antenna. The radio unit steps up the modulation of the data from the indoor unit to a higher microwave frequency. The antenna focuses the microwave signal into a narrow beam that radiates toward the opposite receiving antenna.

Because of the crucial link between the two centers, Southwest recommended that the district use its 950 LAN radio with a standard two-foot antenna to ensure the highest level of connectivity. Because the district had already tried spread spectrums Southwest knew that line-of-sight existed. Both locations also had existing towers on which to mount the radios. Today's microwave systems are easy to install, lightweight, compact and easy to maintain. Small microwave systems require only a 2.5-inch post mounted outside with clean line-of-sight to operate effectively. These factors reduce the time it takes to install, as well as reducing related costs.

So the link was installed on a trial basis. The district kept the link running for many months. According to Little, "We hammered the equipment very hard to get it to fail. It didn't." The school district then decided to go ahead and connect all of the other schools.

A complete field survey was then performed on the rest of the schools to check for clear line-of-sight to either one of the towers where the initial radios were installed. The survey determined that all the schools had line-of-sight to one of the towers, except one which had a line-of-sight to another school, making it an ideal candidate for connectivity through a repeater at one of the other schools.

Since most of the schools were within a one-mile radius of one of the towers, Southwest suggested using its smaller 875 LAN radios, which have a maximum distance of three miles. Each school building would have installed on it a radio aimed back to one of the towers. The location of the towers made splitting the network into two segments ideal. One group aimed at the administration building and the other at the maintenance facility.

This divided the WAN in half, with both sides being connected through the two hubs. From the two hubs, the collected data is downloaded into the school district's LAN and main servers. The data is then routed back from the servers to the two hubs, going through routers which manage the two-way traffic. All the schools are now fully connected, with complete access to anything on the network. The school requiring a repeater site has its data downloaded to the repeating school and then the data from both schools is broadcast out to one of the collection points.

An integral part of the contract called for Southwest Microwave to provide both continuing technical support and training on the system, as needed, for personnel.

The microwave radios, except for a few problems at the beginning of the installation, have been up and running without any failures," Little says. "We have not yet seen the .005% outage we talked about. We have not experienced any loss of data or downtime on any of the radios." One of the reasons many schools and institutions have been using Southwest Microwave radios is that, since Southwest supports layer MAC addressing and does not filter further, its radios will pass and support Apple Talk. While most schools use Apple Talk, not all radios can support it.

www.southwestmicrowave.com

Circle 274 for more information from Southwest Microwave

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