Reliable connectivity is now essential for business of all shapes and sizes. It’s the engine room of all commercial activities, from sales campaigns to admin functions, enabling improved engagement with customers and productivity. It’s also the gateway to an exciting world of unified communications and hosted services, which can empower staff to work, communicate and collaborate more effectively and efficiently.
Businesses across the UK are benefitting from the roll-out of super-fast fibre, delivering high-performance broadband connectivity. However, in many rural and semi-rural locations, it’s simply not practical to tap directly into BT’s fibre network infrastructure. That means finding an alternative solution that’s workable and cost effective.
With 4G and 5G networks offering improved speed, coverage and resilience, mobile connectivity has become a realistic alternative to a fixed line option. Offering geographical flexibility, a mobile broadband solution can be deployed quickly and cost-effectively with no need for disruptive groundworks to lay cabling or costly installation of network infrastructure.
Read on to find out how we helped one customer use 4G mobile connectivity to provide a reliable broadband service to a remote office location…
Client Brief
Our client is a large and very successful landscape gardening business. Although the majority of their work is carried out at customers’ premises, the team of 60 staff operates from a portacabin office, situated in the middle of field in the heart of rural Cambridgeshire.
The remote location of the office building obviously caused significant challenges in providing a good connectivity solution. There was no phone line, so options for delivering a fixed line service were limited. It was deemed too costly and disruptive to excavate and lay underground cabling over such a large distance. As for overhead cabling, this would be expensive and, more importantly, would rely on using an ADSL solution over traditional copper telephone lines, a temporary solution, which would become obsolete in 2025 when BT switches off the public switched telephone network (PSTN).
How We Helped
The 4G mobile signal in the area was good, so we decided that this was the way to go. However, the portacabin was positioned in a dip in the landscape and it wasn’t possible to get mobile reception inside the building. Therefore, delivering an effective connectivity solution was dependent on finding a way of getting a robust 4G mobile signal into the site.
Fortunately, there was a disused telegraph pole close to the portacabin. This enabled us to position a receiving aerial in an elevated position, which could pick up the mobile signal from a nearby mast. We then installed ethernet cabling from the aerial to the 4G network router located in the portacabin.
The Result
Our client’s team are now able to work more productively and efficiently with a fast, stable 4G mobile broadband solution. Using the versatility of mobile connectivity, we were able to deliver a right-sized solution that’s affordable and future proofed.