WANs, VoIP & Convergence Enterprise All-Stars Read the latest WhitePaper - Determining the cause of poor application performance

Guide to the '06 All-Stars Winners alphabetical listing WINNERS BY TECHNOLOGY Applications | LANs & Routers | Network Management | OS, Servers & Data Center | Security | Storage | WAN, VoIP & Convergence | Wireless & Mobility WINNERS BY INDUSTRY Construction | Education | Financial Services | Government | Healthcare | Manufacturing | Media | Retail | Travel/Transportation | Utilities Vendors to the All-Stars

Kansas City Power & Light

Broadband microwave brightens the outlook.

Facing application-performance issues, the IT team at this Kansas City, Mo., utility knew it needed to address bottlenecks created by the aging 6GHz licensed digital microwave network connecting power plants, substations and corporate locations. It found the answer in a specialty broadband wireless system from Orthogon Systems (now Motorola).

The OS-Spectra Ethernet bridge provides point-to-point connectivity in near- or non-line-of-sight environments. For Kansas City Power & Light, the microwave system has boosted throughput from 1.5M to 100Mbps, enabling the utility to support new business-critical applications, such as Internet access, multimedia and VoIP. Since the project was completed in May, managers report more timely access to reporting data and business units are developing new applications that would not run efficiently on the old network. The utility invested $950,000 in the broadband wireless system.

Vassar Brothers Medical Center

New wireless infrastructure eases communications pains.

Employees at Vassar Brothers Medical Center, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., had been spending a lot of time trying to connect with one another as they roamed hospital floors. With the implementation of InnerWireless' Medical-grade Wireless Utility, hospital personnel can connect with one another instantly.

The new wireless infrastructure, built on a broadband antenna system that carries radio frequency signals, accommodates a broad range of wireless services including two-way radio, paging, cellular and wireless LAN.

At Vassar Brothers, the $3.2 million upgrade has significantly improved employee productivity, among other benefits. For example, the medical center reports reducing the amount of time spent trying to find the right staff members by 85 minutes per nurse per shift, as they no longer need to sit by the nursing station waiting on physicians to return calls or to answer the nurse-call system.