Manchester Metronet, UK - Welcome To The Wireless City

Service providers

Manchester Metronet, UK

Metronet utilises InfiNet's products for customers and locations where bandwidth requirements are more demanding, and where reliability is of paramount importance in particularly difficult environments. Since we have been deploying Infinet's broadband wireless products, what really stands out is the reliability of the units in the field and the support we receive from InfiNetWireless as a vendor – this is particularly important to Metronet given our customer SLA and support commitments.

James McCall Operations Director,
Metronet UK

Metronet's model is clearly both a commercial and technical success in the market: not only is it consistently experiencing rapid year-on-year growth in excess of 50% per year, it is also now expanding into adjacent territories and cities in the West Midlands, North of England and in Dublin, Ireland. With more than 75% of the UK's Gigabit wireless links registered to Metronet, the Company has unmatched expertise in a technology that allows it to develop ultra high speed Metropolitan networks at a fraction of the cost of cabled network alternatives.

http://www.metronet-uk.com/

Objectives

To offer customers a viable alternative to traditional leased line services using broadband last-mile wireless technologies;
To offer customers a contractual Service Level Agreement (SLA) guaranteeing service levels of 99.95% with 4-hours break/fix reliability across last-mile wireless connections and core MPLS fibre-optic network backbone ;
To be able to support a complete range of advanced services to end users across wireless technology, covering basic connectivity to more advanced services such as VoIP, IP CCTV Surveillance, Business Continuity services and advanced data services including Premium WAN,
MPLS IP VPN, Managed Security, Colocation and QinQ ;
To offer “fixed menu-price” managed services of up to 200 Mbps across wireless last-mile connections, with each installation rated at a maximum 50% throughput on install (i.e. for a 200Mbps contracted connection, a 400Mbps link is installed).
To be the industry best in customer support. This means all support is performed in-house, with no reliance on 3rd-parties to provide support. This, in turn, translates as a direct requirement to any vendor providing equipment or services directly to Metronet.

Challenges

Achieving 99.95% reliability with 4-hour break-fix guaranteed across the whole network, including last-mile wireless links, is a difficult proposition and must be carefully managed;
Ensuring vendor support from global suppliers in order to reach the above targets for customer SLAs, and in particular from wireless equipment, which has the highest risk factor for reliability given the location, climate and external influence factors;
Offering high-value services across an SLA-driven wireless infrastructure, including bandwidth and latency-sensitive services such as Voice/VoIP,
Video & CCTV (at a minimum of DVD-quality of 25 frames per second), Enterprise database access services and data-centre/business resilience services.

Solution

InfiMan and InfiMan 2x2 Point-to-Multipoint products;
Customer Premise: R5000-Mm and R5000-Sm integrated antenna products provide point-topoint and point-to-multipoint access to customers requiring warranted throughputs of 30Mbps, 50Mbps and 80Mbps;
Core backhaul: R5000-Om and R5000-Mme backhaul products with throughputs of 80 and 300 Mbps respectively.