March 2, 2006 San Diego, CA -- 2Connect Bahrain has deployed LightPointe's FlightStrata 100 XA system of outdoor, point-to-point wireless links as part of a metropolitan Ethernet mesh network throughout Bahrain's capital city of Manama. According to a press release, the carrier has installed eight FlightStrata 100 XA links to provide local businesses with secure, high-capacity voice, data and video communications while ensuring "five nines" carrier-class network availability, even under some of the country's harshest environmental conditions.
2Connect Bahrain says it is the first competitive carrier to roll out enhanced network services following the deregulation of the country's telecommunications industry in July 2004. To speed its network build-out, the carrier says it began installing its own high-speed infrastructure in mid-2005, completely bypassing the fiber network of the incumbent carrier, Bahrain Telecommunications Company (Batelco).
Centrally located in a major skyscraper in Manama, 2Connect installed LightPointe FlightStrata 100 XA links on its rooftop as well as those of nearby buildings for distributing Fast Ethernet point-to-point connectivity to major companies in the country's financial services, insurance, and hospitality industries. The carrier offers a variety of bandwidth- intensive business services, including broadband data, telephony, virtual private networking, and video conferencing. The carrier says it has found that the LightPointe system is an ideal means of expediting delivery of high-speed, reliable network services without incurring substantial infrastructure costs or recurring fixed-line access fees.
"We are rapidly signing up new customers and capturing market share, while our competitors still pay for leased lines," says Fahad AlShirawi, managing director of 2Connect. "LightPointe's outdoor wireless connections let us expand our high-speed network faster as well as more simply and economically than with any other technology - and still pass along significant savings to our customers."
The carrier says the LightPointe links also serve as cost-effective "last-mile" access connections to international network circuits. For a major financial- services customer, the carrier says it installed a FlightStrata 100 XA to replace three local access lines to international circuits, resulting in savings of more than $10,000 per month. After two months, the carrier says the LightPointe link produced a return on investment by eliminating the customer's monthly leased-line fee.
Prior to selecting the LightPointe system, 2Connect says it conducted extensive research into a wide range of connectivity options, including stand-alone radio frequency (RF), microwave, WiMAX, and CDMA platforms. In making its decision, the company factored in environmental considerations; Bahrain, an island in the Persian Gulf, has arid desert terrain with near-constant haze and dust. For these reasons, the carrier says it put the LightPointe links through rigorous testing before deciding that the FlightStrata 100 XA system delivered both the requisite capacity and network availability.
LightPointe says its FlightStrata 100 XA system combines a Fast Ethernet optical link with 5.8 GHz unlicensed Radio Frequency (RF) technology, providing built-in redundancy for "all weather" outdoor wireless networking. 100-Mbit/sec full-duplex connectivity is achieved through a primary optical wireless path. In the event the primary path is broken or temporarily disrupted by harsh environmental conditions, network traffic is switched instantly to the secondary 72-Mbit/sec RF path to maintain availability. LightPointe says they system's DualPath architecture, with its redundant optical and RF wireless paths, switches seamlessly as needed between the two wireless technologies in a manner completely transparent to 2Connect's corporate customers.
With aggressive marketing plans underway, 2Connect says it plans to deploy five additional LightPointe links per month for a total of 60 new outdoor point-to-point wireless installations in 2006. The carrier is also evaluating LightPointe's FlightLite 100 model for use in multi-tenant residential applications.
"In emerging and deregulated markets, LightPointe's outdoor point-to-point wireless solutions are accelerating new network rollouts amid ever-increasing competition and growing subscriber demand for bandwidth-intensive voice and data services," concludes Bob Preston, LightPointe's chief marketing officer.