GLOUCESTERSHIRE COLLEGE

South West Communications Group provides College with point to point connectivity to rapidly solve their urgent need for a link between their two sites.

Gloucestershire College provides further and higher swcomms’ wireless engineers carried out a detailed education through a wide range of education and site survey to ascertain whether a point to point training programmes, including A-levels and GCSEs, connection was possible. Their years’ of specialist vocational qualifications, work-based learning, basic experience really paid dividend as they tried to find a skills courses, higher education, short courses for solution to the hefty challenge posed by the business, part-time day and evening courses and timescale, the grade II listing and the bridge. English for overseas students. It is based on two sites in and with the former site The survey revealed that by using an internal wall of split between two buildings in the Gloucester Docks. the communications room in the warehouse to mount point to point equipment on, the wireless link Gloucestershire College is based on a state-of-the-art could be beamed through a window that faced the site alongside the River Severn. However, additional main site at such at angle that it avoided any signal space had been obtained on the fourth floor of a disruption from the movements of the swing bridge. former warehouse on the other side of the river. The warehouse building was grade II listed and there was Motorola Spectra 600 devices were installed at both an iron swing bridge that dissected the distance sites. The warehouse dish was installed inside the between two buildings. building and the main site device was mounted on a patio stand on a flat roof, which avoided having to The College needed to link the warehouse to the puncture the roof itself. The 300Mbps half duplex link local area network (LAN) at the main college site and gave the College the bandwidth it required to this needed to be achieved before the start of the connect the two sites efficiently. academic year. A traditional LAN extension service (LES) between the sites from a network carrier Rapid lead times can be achieved with microwave would take at least 65 working days to complete yet point to point installations. Gloucestershire College the start of term was less than four weeks away. had quotes from other communications companies to provide a LES but this would have taken up to three The challenge was further complicated by the months to complete. The College placed its order warehouse’s listed status and also the obstacle with us on August 19 and the installation was created by the bridge. Grade II listed buildings are not completed on August 27. A microwave link can be permitted to mount any object onto their external achieved within five working days. walls or roofs. Plus, the swing bridge would be raised and lowered throughout the day potentially blocking The point to point microwave link was also far more any wireless links that could be set up between the cost-effective than a LES and did not require the local two sites. disruption caused by roadworks to lay extra cabling.