SME News Q2 2018

24 SME NEWS / Q2 2018 , Connexin and Siklu deliver an advancedmmWave network for business broadband and Smart City applications in the City of Bradford, UK. Delivering an Advanced mmWave Network for Business Broadband and Smart City Applications The City of Bradford is the 4th largest metropolitan district in England, located in West Yorkshire. With a population of more than 1.5 million residents, the city is the sixth-most populous local authority district in England. Home to several large national and international businesses, such as Morrisons, Pace Plc and Hallmark Cards as well as large financial institutions. Gigabit connectivity is an essential business enabler for this ecosystem of businesses. Connexin a company specialising in building and operating award- winning Smart City Infrastructure to support the Internet of Things has made a commercial investment in support of a high- bandwidth network infrastructure in the City of Bradford. This is to support future applications such as high-speed Fibre Wireless Access (FWA), Public Safety, Smart Traffic Management, Smart Waste Management, City Wide Public Wi-Fi Network and more. All of this serves to help fuel economic development, social inclusion and provide residents and businesses with a safer, better place to live and work. Challenges A key challenge with so many services to be supported was to implement a single, city-wide network that can provide enough capacity for all these services today, as well as the ability to easily scale up the capacity as more connected devices and locations are added, it needs to be IoT and Smart City ready. “It was important for us that the network would be future proof, we needed something that was going to last for years to come and carry an exceptional amount of bandwidth” said Max Wilson of Connexin. While fibre is a core portion of the Bradford citywide network, it doesn’t have the ubiquitous coverage needed, a limitation that can be remedied with the addition of mmWave wireless. Connexin was looking for a wireless solution that would perform like fibre but without the enormous up-front trenching costs and problematic timeline indicative of fibre deployments. They needed a fast, full duplex gigabit service with extremely high reliability and low latency. With high scalability and low latency in mind, Connexin sought to move to a reliable wireless network for its future infrastructure, replacing its dependence on leased fibre with its costly monthly fees. The Solution Connexin first started using Siklu mmWave wireless fibre in Bradford City to provide business broadband connectivity and the vast majority of the network is built on Siklu technology. Connexin and Siklu currently provide Public Wi-Fi backhaul to thousands of businesses every day. This long and successful partnership has proven to Connexin that Siklu are a key technology partner for building intelligent city-wide networks. “Smart Cities will require a network of networks to be deployed. We see the Siklu network as a key component of enabling the smart cities of the future.” Explains Connexin Head of Smart Cities, Sam Forester. Sixty EH-1200 series Gigabit radios were deployed to serve as the backbone for the wireless network. Connexin engineered the mmWave links so that each exceeds 99.99% reliability at distances of up to 3.2 Kilometres. A minimum of 100 Mbps was needed, with the ability to scale up to a gigabit/ps connectivity