Wide Area Networks  (WANs) means building data networks across suburbs, cities and to remote locations. Quite often this involves access building rooftops, 3rd party mast or towers, or constructing your own masts or towers to get radio line of sight between the two ends.

WAN’s enable companies or Government departments to have high bandwidht, high availability data connections without having on going carrier fees. They have a high upfront cost but low on going costs per month/ year. 

Normally you can expect far greater (up to 1-2Gbps FD) connections between sites which are secure and protected by the ACMA.

For example where it is not possible to get a fibre optic connection to a mobile phone tower, the tower will be connected back to the carrier network using high bandwidth microwave links. 

Some carrier have built entire networks without using any fibre optic at all, chosing instead to deploy a WAN to service their customers.

Major Benefits of a radio based WAN:

  1. You own the bandwidth and are not sharing it with other users like ADSL and the NBN.
  2. It is secure and not prone to carrier failure is someone digs up a fiber optic cable.
  3. Ideal for disaster recovery or offsite backup of large volumes of information.
  4. You can achieve much higher bandwidth connections for very little ongoing costs that would be prohibitive on an NBN or Business service.
  5. You own the infrastructure and are immune to increases in carrier charges for Business grade services.
  6. You can have a single internet connection to service all of your locations saving costs on edge routing and internet costs.
  7. You can have a distributed VoIP phone system with a single head end instead of multiple small systems at every site.
  8. You can have a single server farm instead of multiple servers at every site.

As you can see the advantages are many. 

How a WAN would look:

This example provides 100Mbps FD connection from head office to each remote office and has disaster recovery and backup in a co-location facility.

 

What happens if there is no Line of Sight?:

It is quite possible that, unless you have close buildings, tall buildings or terrain advantages, you will need help linking some of your sites together.

There are many ways to over come this which include using what is known as Repeater points:

  1. Using the roof space of somewhere nearby that is taller and has LOS to the other end of your link. Renting roofspace does come at a cost that needs to be included in your WAN budget depending on the amount of equipment required.
  2. Using 3rd party masts or towers to provide line of sight. Most mobile phone towers and facility owners allow business to rent space on their structures and inside the compound to install the necessary equipment to complete their WAN. 
  3. Install a guyed mast on your own building to get the LOS you need. These can be engineered and installed up to 30m high. It will require engineering and council approval but you will own the asset. 

Find out more about network design and planning on our page Wide Area Networks and Infrastructure

To get in contact with us about a WAN for your business head to our Contact Page