COUNTRY FOCUS: LEVANT
Driving forward the
wireless network
For this month’s country focus, Intelligent CIO examines how
InfiNet Wireless has updated the wireless network infrastructure
in Lebanon for Connect.
I
nfiNet Wireless has provided
Connect, Lebanon’s premier ISP,
with a robust backbone for its
new wireless network infrastructure.
Connect selected InfiNet Wireless to
supply the upgraded platform that will
allow it to meet the high-bandwidth
and zero-downtime demands of
premium residential and enterprise
customers across the country.The
system will also significantly reduce
maintenance and service costs.
Jubran El Ayan, RF Manager at
Connect, explained the challenges
the company is facing with their
existing network.
“We are using a WiMAX Network, on
the 2.3 GHz frequency band, to serve
residential customers,” said El Avan.
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“While we are able to meet the
standard bandwidth requirements of
our residential customers, some of our
premium residential and corporate
customers such as banks and retail
outlets, require high bandwidth.
“Our existing WiMAX platform is
limited to 5 Mbps for downlink and
2 Mbps for uplink which meant
that we simply could not meet such
bandwidth requirements.”
“To serve premium and corporate
customers, we had to use Wi-Fi
based point-to-point (PTP) solutions
available in the local market but
the frequency bands that we were
operating in started to suffer from
major interference issues, resulting
in a further drop in capacity and
decreasing reliability.
“More importantly, the deployed Wi-
Fi platform proved to be extremely
temperamental – links would go
down frequently and it ultimately
got to a point where we had to
send field engineers to troubleshoot
outages and maintain the network
on a daily basis.
“Not only was this a drain on our
resources and added significant
costs to our operations, but we had
several unhappy customers which
was hurting our reputation and
revenue streams.”
Realising that upgrading their
wireless network infrastructure
was critical to the viability of the
business itself, Connect turned
to their sister company, Mada in
Kuwait, for a recommendation on
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