Delivering reliable Wireless High Bandwidth IP Connectivity to schools in the Outer Shetland Islands

16th December 2019

The Challenge

The Shetland Islands Council needed to provide two new schools in the Outer Shetland islands with telephony, IT functions, CCTV and high tech classroom aids such as video conferencing links. What’s more, although the solution could be funded from capital budget, financial constraints meant the council didn’t want to incur ongoing costs.

The Solution

Tellemachus designed and implemented the solution in close consultation with the Councils IT department. Two links were needed, both had to cope with the challenge of being primarily over water, and the link between the two schools also suffered from terrain obstacles.

To overcome the challenge of Link 1, a connectorised Non Line of Sight Wireless Link was deployed. Adding a powerful high-gain external antenna to the hardware and software, generated even higher signal gain – and enabled a reliable 6.93 mile link to be established between the two schools, despite the over-water path and the terrain obstacles.

To achieve the 12.5 mile link from the Shetland Islands Council offices to the second school, we deployed the integrated Non Line of Sight Wireless Link. This was able to cope with the difficulties presented by the link being primarily over water – plus the fact that we had to deploy it at a 90-degree angle to the side of the office building, as this was the only position available.

The Results? Despite the obstacles presented, both of the Wireless links have achieved 99.999% availability since their deployment in 2005. Better still, they have cost-effectively enabled the delivery of high-tech schooling to remote environments and eliminated the need for any recurring costs.

The Benefits

• Multibeam space time coding and intelligent-dynamic frequency
• Selection (i-DFS) built into the Non Line of Sight Wireless Link meant that it could cope with the demanding non-line-of-sight challenge of a long distance over-water link with terrain obstacles
• The lack of recurring costs for the Non Line of Sight Wireless Link meant that the Shetland Island Council had complete budget control and were not reliant on any third party telecommunications operators
• High availability and high level of reliability of the technology
• Eliminated the need for local servers at the two schools, which reduced the overall IT spend
• Low operational and maintenance costs.