Colorado Front Range WISP Cost-Effectively Extends Network Reach and Capacity Using RAD’s RIC Products

Mesa Networks provides wireless broadband connectivity along the Colorado Front Range. The CFR is a stretch of land running south from Ft. Collins to Colorado Springs, and is situated where the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains meet the open spaces of the Great Plains.

In the summer of 2005, already with a substantial base of approximately 4,000 subscribers, 80 percent of which are residential customers, Mesa sought to expand their base by attracting more business customers. They realized, however, that their maximum capacity was insufficient to support the additional demand that bandwidth-hungry businesses would place on the network. They also recognized the hefty capital expenditures and protracted time-tomarket involved in building out their existing network infrastructure.

Essentially, they needed a solution that would extend their network footprint, increase their network capacity, and attract more business customers, but at the same time not cost a great deal of money and not take very long to deploy. That's what led them to RAD’s family of RIC products.

The RIC products are intelligent interface converters that enable cost-effective transport of Ethernet traffic over TDM circuits. Covering a broad range of throughput capacities, there are RIC products designed to transport traffic as light as fractionalized T1/E1 all the way up to the backbone capacity of an OC-12. In Mesa's case, they needed RAD’s RIC-155GE and RICi-T3 to transport Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet over OC-3 and T3 connections, respectively.

Traditionally, Ethernet is transported over SONET using layer 3 devices. However, the OC-3/T3 wide area interface cards on routers tend to be expensive. With low-cost service delivery a key objective, Mesa searched for alternatives and discovered RAD's efficient and economical RIC family.

Operating at Layer 2, the RIC units provide Ethernet bridging, rate-limiting, and offer four levels of QoS priority queues as specified in 802.1p, which enables Mesa to offer differentiated connectivity services based on the end-user's application requirements. They also feature a suite of OAM tools including fault propagation and extensive network management and diagnostic tools to minimize provisioning and operating costs. Said Bill Fowler, Mesa’s CTO, “In addition to the RAD converters being more cost-effective than expensive router interfaces they are also easier to manage.”

The fact that some of Mesa’s connections were wireline and some were wireless didn't make a difference, as the RIC products seamlessly interoperate with either type of transport. This enables Mesa to not only extend their Ethernet service footprint over third-party TDM infrastructure, but to further cost-effectively extend their service footprint to areas where there is little-to-no communications infrastructure. This is especially important for some of the rural and underdeveloped locales throughout the CFR.

These features, along with the RIC’s cost-competitiveness and ease of installation, convinced Mesa Network’s engineering and executive team that the RIC solution was ideal for their network and their business objectives. According to Todd Bergstrom, Mesa Network’s CEO, “We recently reconfigured our network architecture to achieve greater cost efficiencies. RAD's RIC products were instrumental in achieving those efficiencies.”