Ireland’s leading waste resource management and recycling provider, Greenstar has reduced its annual telecommunications bill by over 60 per cent, following the award of a three-year contract to Complete Telecom. The 20-site network provides speeds of between 2 Mb at smaller sites and 10 Mb at larger sites and company headquarters. The network also incorporates unique link bonding technology, based on a product from Viprinet, which allows the bundling of several 3G, DSL or Ethernet-presented lines at remote, rural sites where telecommunications connectivity speeds are poor. This enables Greenstar to provide sufficient bandwidth for its critical line-of-business applications to all sites, nationwide.

Mission-critical infrastructure
Greenstar’s telecoms network is a piece of mission-critical infrastructure, as Russell Gascoine, IT manager with the company explains. “Much of our revenue comes from weighbridges, located at 20 sites throughout the country. Trucks weigh in their recyclables and our Waste Information Management System (WIMS) logs this data and invoices it out accordingly. If our network is down, you could literally have queues of trucks outside our landfill depots, unable to discharge their recyclables. Network speed is important, but reliability even more so. Downtime just isn’t an option for us,” he adds.

Thinking outside the box
In looking at potential service providers, Gascoine approached three to bid for the business. “The decision ultimately came down to price,” he comments. “But the Complete Telecom bid was the only one that offered DSL-type speeds at competitive rates. Other providers proposed leased lines for some of our more remote locations, but this approach was prohibitively expensive. The Viprinet ‘bonding’ solution was the differentiator for us and provided the ultimate in flexibility at sites where DSL speeds were low.”

“The geographic spread of Greenstar sites, some of which had little or no broadband connectivity, posed quite a challenge for us,” comments Neil Wisdom, sales director with Complete Telecom. “Application access is based on a Citrix thin-client platform, which requires a certain amount of bandwidth and low latency. We knew the existing telecoms services just wouldn’t do the job.”

“We made the right choice with Complete Telecom. The price was right and their link bonding solution tackled our bandwidth requirements in a cost-effective and innovative way. ” – Russell Gascoine, IT manager, Greenstar

In the case of the Kilcullen site, for example, the location was just too far from the telecoms exchange for broadband access. However, a 3G backup network was already in place. “We simply took 2 x 3G wireless circuits, used our link bonding technology to join them together and provided a 3 Mb upload and 7Mb download speed,” explains Wisdom. “It was a simple solution to a real, practical problem,” he adds.

Unlike load balancers, which distribute network traffic in line with available capacity, Viprinet can actually bundle up to six links (3G, ADSL, or Ethernet) together to create a single, “fat pipe”. Combining different access media using multiple providers delivers the highest reliability and maximum flexibility at very low cost.

Transparent telecoms reporting
As part of the managed service, Complete Telecom provides Russell Gascoine and his team with access to StableNet – this provides full visibility of real-time telecoms usage at each site. For example, if bandwidth reaches a certain threshold, the IT team can identify the source and take remedial action. Similarly, emails are generated to support staff as soon as certain thresholds on the network are reached. This introduces a pre-emptive approach to managing network resources.

“This degree of granular visibility really helps Greenstar to optimise its network resources,” says Wisdom. “For example, their IT team was able to see that anti-virus and Windows updates were downloading during the day and negatively impacting bandwidth availability. Prompted by this, they could re-schedule this traffic for after hours and preserve bandwidth for more critical business traffic,” he said.

“We are confident that we have made the right choice with Complete Telecom,” concludes Gascoine. “We are a very cost-conscious organisation and our ability to slash telecommunications costs by more than 60 per cent whilst still maintaining reliability and availability, allows us to provide high levels of customer service and management information reporting cost effectively to our customers.”

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