Case Study: A Reliable Wireless Gigabit Solution for the Oregon Zoo
The Challenge The Oregon Zoo employs 170 full and part-time positions within its 64 acre grounds and is visited by 1,400,000 individuals each year! With this amount of activity, connection performance and reliability is imperative to successful zoo operations. Previously, most of the zoo’s buildings were supplied access through use of a T1 connection linked with the facilities LAN. The connection was simply not meeting the bandwidth demand, so an agreement to connect to Metro’s SONET fiber backbone was made. The problem? The fibers point-of-presence was located all the way across the zoo’s 960 space parking lot!
The Options Facing a capacity dilemma, the Oregon Zoo had several options to choose from. Trenching fiber across their main parking lot to reach the POP could set them back $100,000 or more and take many months to complete. Furthermore, trenching could potentially produce expensive complications such as business down-time. An alternative would be bunching a few more T1’s to the existing LAN; but even then the zoo would be adding only a minute amount of capacity for their investment. The third option would be to use a point-to-point wireless bridge to access the fiber POP.
A Reliable Solution The Oregon Zoo selected ezWireless to design and implement a wireless bridge that would allow the zoo’s buildings to achieve the capacity it needed at 99.999% availability. To accomplish this, the Bridgewave FE60 100mb link was chosen because of its ez installation and unobtrusive nature. The link was entirely up and running within a month and all for under $20,000. The license-free radios required no digging, no permits and no recurring fees. And as for reliability? The products and services ezWireless implement have a MTBF of 28 years and have gone through Rigorous HALT/HASS testing. When it comes to the Oregon Zoo, there’s no monkeying around!
performance and reliability is imperative to successful zoo operations. Previously, most of the zoo’s buildings were supplied access through use of a T1 connection linked with the facilities LAN. The connection was simply not meeting the bandwidth demand, so an agreement to connect to Metro’s SONET fiber backbone was made. The problem? The fibers point-of-presence was located all the way across the zoo’s 960 space parking lot! 
allow the zoo’s buildings to achieve the capacity it needed at 99.999% availability. To accomplish this, the Bridgewave FE60 100mb link was chosen because of its ez installation and unobtrusive nature. The link was entirely up and running within a month and all for under $20,000. The license-free radios required no digging, no permits and no recurring fees. And as for reliability? The products and services ezWireless implement have a MTBF of 28 years and have gone through Rigorous HALT/HASS testing. When it comes to the Oregon Zoo, there’s no monkeying around!
