Case Studies - Wireless Point-to-Point WAN.
Community Foundation of Northwest Indiana
Community Foundation of Northwest Indiana is a Hospital group comprised of three hospitals and numerous clinic operations. The group includes Community Hospital, St. Mary’s hospital and St. Catherine’s hospital. The operation is spread over a 400 square mile area serving Northwest
Indiana. Collectively, these hospitals can serve over 1000 people simultaneously
within their 3 locations. Map overview |
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The Project Brief.
The Community Foundation of Northwest Indiana (CFNI) needed to interlink their campuses with a high speed network to replace the rapidly narrowing pipeline the leased T1 circuits were providing. The upgrade was needed to provide high bandwidth connectivity to the sites for critical new human information systems (HIS) and patient information systems. The new systems would utilize a central server bank and back-up bank at two different hospitals. These server banks would need extremely high reliability and speeds for the connections.
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Additionally, with the new Patient information system, digital images would be kept on the servers and need to be transported to any number of viewing centers with in the group. This new system would allow patient information to be available at blink speeds, versus the wait time for a courier service to deliver hard prints. This time savings can be extremely critical in an emergency situation. Additionally, specialized imaging clinics could be deployed allowing easier access for customers to the groups imaging facilities and immediate viewing by a specialized Radiologist at an off-site hospital. |
Alternatives did not measure up!
Previously CFNI had been using a 1.544 Mbps T1 connection that no longer met the bandwidth or reliability requirements. The criteria for the new connection was to provide greater that 300 Mbps of connectivity with a reliability of greater that 99.9995%. CFNI were investigating many alternatives for this connectivity solution. Local telephone carriers were contacted finding only that solutions meeting the needs for reliability and bandwidth were extremely costly, ultimately affecting the operating budget forever, this being prohibitive overall.
NIC Technologies Solution..
CFNI choose NIC technologies for the installation and overall project management. This solution gave CFNI a fixed operating cost for 4 years, extremely high reliability and simple expansion for greater than 600Mbps. NIC chose Ceragon Networks high MTBF FibeAir microwave system for the installation. The system is designed to operate in the 6 and 11 GHz band. NIC Technologies installed 8 FibeAir radio links for the CFNI network. These radios have been configured to operate in a Packet over SONET network. This is very simple as the radios are a true SONET regenerator. This combined with Cisco 7507 routing equipment provides a 311Mbps environment by bonding two (2) OC3 Multi-mode fiber connections to provide the aggregate of 311Mbps. The Cisco routers provide the edge routing which is then connected to Cisco 6509 and 4507 core switches.
The installation of the network was scheduled for the end of 2004 with other phases beginning in 2005, with the project being completed by the end of September 2005. The project was completed before schedule providing a measured 99.99995% reliability on the first link established.
System Overview
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Community foundation of Northwest Indiana Hospital Links
The operation is spread over a 400 square mile area serving Northwest Indiana.
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