Mimosa Simplifies Licensed 11 GHz Deployments for Joink

Introduction

Founded in 2001, Joink LLC is a leading technology solutions provider offering high-speed internet, hosting solutions and technology services to over 1,400 wireless customers in West Central Indiana and East Central Illinois. Partnering with industry leading vendors, Joink delivers advanced IT solutions to small and mid-sized business clients ranging over 1,000 square miles in the rural Midwest. With its business growing rapidly and increasing demands on its network, Joink needed to substantially expand its network capacity.

An important part of the upgrade required replacing unlicensed radios on 13 key backhaul links with Mimosa B11 backhaul radios for enhanced reliability. Joink also upgraded an existing licensed 11 GHz link, replacing the more expensive, older radios with the Mimosa B11. Link distances for these 11 GHz licensed links ranged from five to 15 miles. The B11 rings were specifically designed so that 85% of Joink’s subscribers are not more than one unlicensed backhaul away from a Mimosa B11 backhaul radio.
 

According to Josh Zuerner, Joink’s President & CEO/CTO, Joink immediately saw increased throughput over all the links. “We actually tripled the previous capacity, and, in some cases, saw improvements as much as 10x with the new Mimosa B11 radios,” said Zuerner. “Next we plan to use the B11 as a fiber extension to bring over 1 Gbps of capacity to a few rural towns, which was unimaginable to us just a few years ago.”
 

Joink relied heavily on Mimosa’s Design Tool to make planning decisions and kick off the coordination process. “The Design Tool is fantastic,” said Brian Gray, Joink’s Connectivity Manager. “Being able to visualize the whole ULS database made it very easy to plan our links. The tool does all the work, eliminating the need for us to look up GPS coordinates and fill out paperwork. It also simplified team communication as we had a clear network visualization we could share.”
 

“We tripled our capacity, and, in some cases, saw improvements as much as 10x.”

Joink uses a mix of Jirous and other third-party antennas, and together with the B11 backhaul radios, found the system very easy to deploy. “The slip fit design of the B11 reduces possible service interruptions due to poorly weather-sealed RF connectors and the SFP port ensures clean data transmission even on long cable runs. When we deployed our links, the B11 was the only radio on the market in the price range we could afford with the features and performance we demanded,” according to Gray.

One of the key B11 backhaul radio features that Joink relies upon is Mimosa’s Auto-TDMA, which allows the B11 to dynamically adapt to bandwidth demand, maximizing spectrum utilization throughout the day. “We were excited to see that it behaves as expected, with the links automatically rerouted and with no impact to throughput. It just plain works,” said Gray.

After many months of working with the new gear, Joink could not be happier with the switch to Mimosa. Said CEO Zuerner, “The Mimosa B11 is great fit for our application. We have a lot of business customers and highuse residential customers who need high throughput for gaming and other activities. The B11 backhaul radios have enabled us to keep ahead of the demand and to continue to provide high throughput and availability for our clients.”