fSONA's optical wireless systems picked for Kuwaiti healthcare network

August 2, 2005 Mclean, VA -- fSONA Systems, a provider of optical wireless systems, today announced that Smart Link Telecom, in strategic alliance with Advance Technologies Company (ATC), is deploying a city-wide, high-capacity wireless network throughout Kuwait City for that country's Ministry of Health (MOH).

The company's SONAbeam optical wireless network will transport critical hospital data, as well as files generated by CAT scans, from specialized clinics across the city and hospital campus sites. CAT scan images are made up of a series of X-ray "slices," each ranging from 8 to 12 MBytes in size.

"At the present time the hospital would transfer the images to a compact disc and courier the images from the clinic to the main hospital," explains Mazen Khatib, general manager for Smartlink Telecom. "fSONA and Smartlink Engineering met with the hospital IT department and, after doing an assessment of their overall requirements, it was quickly discovered that a point-to-point radio solution that had already been proposed to them was going to creak at the seams with the sheer bandwidth overload. The only real solution was to utilize free space optics technology for short- to mid-range applications, together with very high capacity, IP-licensed microwave for the long haul segments of the network. With this network the hospital will save a critical amount of time with every transfer."

"Over the past three years Carl Cag of fSONA has become an integral part of the Smartlink Telecom team, and we are now proudly approaching our third year as an fSONA strategic partner," continues Khatib. "This medical network is cutting new ground within the Middle East; it is now delivering 40 times more full duplex capacity across the city than the initial radio LAN proposal for a similar cost. Having dealt with several wireless vendors, it is clear that the strength within fSONA is not only in its unique carrier class transmission products, but within its people - and in this part of the world, people make all the difference."

"SONAbeam products are ideal for meeting the needs of healthcare networks," adds Sunny Taylor, CEO of fSONA. "To reap the benefits that today's healthcare applications offer requires a high-speed communications networks to support them. SONAbeam technology offers very high-speed optical wireless networking that is extremely secure and never compromises the privacy of health records."

fSONA says the Smartlink/ATC hospital network joins other SONAbeam deployments in the region such as the Omnitek Omni Link network in Istanbul, INET's metro Ethernet network in Saudi Arabia, and the Bagram Airbase biometric security network in Afghanistan.