The Background
Lands End Airport is one of our sites – and therefore one of my sites! It is one of our busiest and arguably most popular departure points, is used for Engineering activities as well as managed by ourselves. In that there is a lot of infrastructure up there. And with lots of infrastructure comes plenty of IT requirement.
We have held off on more “modern” services like public internet access, web cams, more traditional airport fare (departure boards, moving adverts, and so on) due to the connectivity, and for historical reasons the site is configured as a single enterprise, with little or so chance of that changing.
As of a couple of minutes ago we have 46 hosts alive on the site. A few are phones and printers but there are at least 20 workstations there.
The Problem
If run a test on the BT broadband checker you get the following depressing output;
In a nutshell “estimated speed 1.5mb”. I have put in many hours with suppliers trying to come up with a solution to the problem and there are none that make complete sense. The only options we have are;
- Bonded ADSL – hard to find anyone who will do this any more, so it’s home-brew all the way. Initial tests thus far are simply not promising.
- Leased Line – the popular choice, a direct link out to the internet.
- P2P Link – this one is interesting, linking Lands End to Penzance office via a private short haul link – obvious DR implications, but to have the site as an extension of our private network?
Till recently things just rumbled along due to the nature of the network – the VPN links supported email and VoIP signalling, but now we have an Active Directory, Centrally Managed/Hosted virus system, SAAS applications, centrally hosted shares and so on, network throughput has increased. And of course it would be inappropriate to suggest that the Internet is only used for business-related activity – but there is a general understanding that the Internet is largely unfiltered so it is open to misuse.
For a period of time we did filter streaming sites and the odd social networking site and that did see an improvement in the speed of the network but also a groundswell of annoyance that we would do anything so draconian as restrict basic human rights to keep in touch with everyone on FB and the like. So the restrictions were removed and things slow down again.
The Choices
Of our choices the concept of bonded ADSL is not going to be entertained, we’ve trialled it locally and it works, but the reference site felt no improvement in connectivity and suffered disconnections when one of the VPN links dropped, not a great upgrade there at all.
The leased line is nice and simple and straightforward – but seriously expensive – a well-known telco have quoted £45,000 for a three year contract to supply 10mb on a 100mb bearer. Not really economically viable – especially with Fibre Broadband potentially around the corner – but more on that in a bit.
The third, more interesting option is a point to point connection, coupled with a faster link in Penzance this has a dual benefit of improving the connectivity on both sites. The problem there is that both Lands End and Penzance would effectively be on the same connection, introducing a single point of failure.
A way around that SPF issue is to leave the existing ADSL connection in situ, and keep the site on it’s existing IP range – which we’d have to do anyway as the VoIP system would not work without major changes – and if there are any outages have instructions for a cable to be pulled out and another connected.
And….
Sounds simple really doesn’t it? There is a fair truth in saying that the site could be on the same IP range as Penzance but the two sites combined would leave very few addresses left unless we change class, but all of that is work that is unnecessary, if we just leave things as they are.
In an ideal world we’d pull a VoIP switch so both sites coexist, but there would be even more work – and at some cost due to external engineering resource requirements.
So, the proposal will be weighted on the P2P/Penzance line, hoping to make the suggestion tomorrow….keep you posted