Quad Cities Online turns to DragonWave for backbone

Quad Cities Online, the ISP arm of the Moline Dispatch and Rock Island (Illinois) Argus newspapers, has turned to Canadian fixed broadband wireless vendor DragonWave to improve its backbone delivery.

“They were having backhaul problems based on increasing interference [in the] 5.8 GHz unlicensed spectrum,” said Ken Davison, DragonWave’s marketing vice president.

On top of that, Quad Cities, which has a commercial customer base, also wanted to upgrade the capacity of their link to 100 Mbps and wanted to find a way to use its licensed 28 GHz LMDS spectrum as part of the overall solution.

“We were the only point-to-point vendor that was able to solve the problem with the 28 GHz point-to-point high-capacity service,” Davison said.

Backbone and other bandwidth congestion problems, he said, are becoming common as more users via of use of unlicensed spectrum in the 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz slots for telephony and/or Wi-Fi and hotspot applications. “That’s good news that helps proliferate broadband wireless applications, but it increases the issues on interference,” Davison said. “If you’re a service provider and you have been using unlicensed bandwidth for backhaul, it’s very difficult to guarantee service levels. Therefore, there’s a migration to licensed bandwidth for the backhaul.”

Thus, Quad Cities, which also provides DSL service, provided an opportunity for DragonWave just because it had LMDS spectrum in its pocket.