* Using wireless for backup
Sure, ringtones, games, cameras and video downloads are exciting. But the wireless network operators now seem to be also growing more sensitive to business requirements.
First came Sprint’s Managed Mobility Service last fall, whereby Sprint will configure, manage and track your fleet of mobile devices. Now mobile network operator Cingular Wireless has announced a disaster recovery service via its EDGE network, which spans 8,500 U.S. cities and towns.
Wireless is a natural fit for back-up/disaster recovery applications, which have been offered for some time by fixed broadband wireless access (BWA) providers such as TowerStream and TransAria. The reason? Wireless perseveres in the face of the dreaded backhoe cable cut and natural disasters that destroy terrestrial lines.
In other words, airborne connections offer true diverse routes to cabled links.
Cingular’s back-up service targets sites with fairly modest bandwidth requirements, given that the EDGE network averages 100K to 135K bit/sec in the download direction, and, in this particular backup configuration, the upload speed is about 50K to 60K bit/sec, according to Cingular.
Bank branches, retail point-of-sale applications, and metering applications, which can’t afford downtime but send small amounts of data or don’t transmit continuously, are strong contenders for the EDGE service.
For example, Florida Power & Light has deployed EDGE networks at its 1,000 locations to back up relatively low-speed circuits supporting monitoring and metering applications. On the other hand, “I wouldn’t suggest CNN use it as a primary video feed backup, 24/7,” says Hamish Caldwell, an executive director in Cingular Business Markets Group.
You purchase a $595 Digi International gateway for each site. If your landline circuit fails, your primary router directs traffic out an alternate port connected to the Digi gateway, which tunnels traffic across the WAN using Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) across the EDGE network, explains Joel Young, Digi’s vice president of engineering. Since tunneling makes the destination look the same to the primary router, no BGP routing table updates need take place, he says.
You pay anywhere from $8.99 to $54.99 per month for the EDGE “wireless circuit” at each location. The actual monthly service charge depends on how much data you think you will be running over the back-up link during the course of the month, and you can pool bandwidth from multiple sites.
Next time: A comparison of wireless back-up services and billing models.
