Boundless Broadband in Britain

Introduction

Boundless Networks was founded in 2010 with a clear objective of becoming the UK’s leading rural broadband provider. The Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) covers over 3,000 square miles with over 5,000 live wireless connections, and delivers superfast broadband to areas of Lancashire and Yorkshire that are not well served by the national providers.

“Despite government intervention to subsidize the roll-out of hundreds of miles of fiber-optic cable to telephone cabinets in the UK, if you are a long way from the exchange, you just won’t get the benefit,” said David Burns, Managing Director of Boundless. “We believe that the existing large broadband providers will never provide a quality service to every property in the UK, as their commercial and technology models will not allow this.”

Boundless operates its own Fiber-optic To The Mast (FTTM) fixed wireless broadband network enabling the WISP to control, monitor and scale systems according to demand. With both business and residential customers, the WISP offers innovative packages catering to 3D video streaming and online gaming as well as specialized packages for certain towns, for example the “Buckshaw Booster” that includes 40 Mbps downloads. Their business packages range from “Broadband Lite” offerings to “Carrier-Grade Data services” packages.

Boundless is a champion of deploying next-generation technologies to ensure all customers can receive quality, high-speed Internet. The company delivers service via a line of sight microwave link and can offer service to customers within ten miles of their local microwave distribution points which are located on high points throughout their service areas. With exact coverage depending on topological features such as hills, trees and buildings, sometimes the WISP will conduct a survey at the customer’s property.

“We found that the B5 gave us a significant advantage in spectral efficiency and substantial cost savings compared with our existing solution.”

With ever increasing demand, Boundless started to evaluate solutions to increase backhaul connectivity between some of their high traffic sites, specifically looking to replace their installed legacy products.

“We chose the Mimosa B5 and B5-Lite due to the improved performance compared to our original equipment,” continued David. “We found that the B5 gave us a significant advantage in spectral efficiency and substantial cost savings compared with our existing solution.”

“The management and control interfaces are so much easier and faster to operate.”

The Mimosa B5 and B5-Lite are deployed on the fairly congested 5.7 GHz to 5.8 GHz spectrum, with 20 MHz channels. With the Mimosa product deployed, link speeds have improved to over 130Mbps from around 90Mbps to using the existing spectrum with less than 2ms latency. The WISP initially deployed three links and more are planned.

“The management and control interfaces are so much easier and faster to operate,” said David. “In addition, the real-time spectrum utilization information is extremely helpful in high noise areas.”