Shoosmiths - Point to Point Case Study

26 November 2018

Shoosmiths is a full-service national UK law firm famous for client service. They have an existing site in Fareham but were migrating to a new office over a 6-month period. The new site was just under 200 meters away.

The Problem

Shoosmiths required a connection between their existing site and their new office they were migrating to. A network solution would provide connectivity for a total of 90 migrating staff.
Challenges for the solution consisted of a short deployment time frame, unknown line of site and a need to minimise invasive fixings at their existing office to help avoid delay from landlord granting permissions. A solution would have to be installed quickly, highly reliable, offering low latency and high throughput with the full support of a support service team.

Way leaves and no existing ducts meant removed leased lines as an option. Shoosmiths contacted DigitalAir for consultation on solutions that could meet their network requirements.

The Solution

DigitalAir worked with Shoosmiths’ on a consultative basis & proposed a solution which follows a project life cycle. The life cycle initially takes shape, starting with ‘the plan phase’ with an on-site survey & indicative proposal. Their survey confirmed that line of sight was present, ascertained the required cable routes & mounting locations.

After the plan phase, comes “The Design Phase” where the solution is technically signed off by one of our lead engineers using the survey and a formal proposal is then provided to the customer. In this case the solution proposed was DigitalAir’s AirBeam.

AirBeam is a complete turnkey solution, using leading manufacturues hardware coupled with the services to integrate and maintain the links. Airbeam would meet the required throughput of 1 Gbps to meet their existing infrastructure requirements.

The link recommended to Shoosmiths was an 80 Ghz Band E wireless link due to the requirement of high availability, low latency and gigabit throughput with AES encryption. The best solution on the market that operates in the 80 Ghz frequency for carrier grade solutions is
manufactured by Siklu. The product recommended was the EH-2200FX.

The solution operates in 80 Ghz which is a light licence frequency requiring a link registration with Ofcom for £50 p.a.

Once the design and statement of works was approved, Shoosmiths was moved into the integration phase and ready to be managed by DigitalAir’s project manage and integration team.

DigitalAir is a certified SAFE contractor and all their engineers are IPAF and working on roofs certified.

The existing site offered a suitable brick wall mounting location which provided a stable platform to mount the first radio with the minimal fixing points being carefully considered.

The new office offered a flat roof with an existing man safe system in place ensuring a safe installation could be conducted and where a non-penetrating roof mount for the second radio was installed.

Once successfull deployment of the wireless link was confirmed by the engineers, optimisation of the links was carried out during the optimisation phase and to confirm the validation of the links.

For the 6 months the AirBeam solutions was in place, the maintenace phase consisted of a support agreement to ensure availability and performance for the duration of the migration project.

The maintenance support agreement includes next business day on-site support in the unlikely event they should suffer any failures and provides access to their service desk to contact should Shoosmiths have
have any queries or report any faults.

DigitalAir’s Gold service was offered which includes Pro-active reporting to report any faults and rectify problems with the link fully supported by an SLA was offered but due to Shoosmiths existing network policies, they preventd third party software being installed on the network which disabled the possibility of pro-active support.

DigitalAir’s maintenance support agreements are customisable on a per-customer basis, to provide the agility of service often demanded amongst their customers.