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Corporate Meshed System - West Africa
 African Mining Services (AMS) a leading surface mining service to the mining industry throughout Africa, had a requirement to build a private communications network to link the numerous mining facilities in Ghana to their regional Head Office in Accra, AMS chose Spidersat Communications Ltd.
Spidersats experience in providing satellite based communications solutions to the corporate market, and their physical presence throughout East & West Africa, gave AMS the confidence to place their requirements in their hands.
To enable AMS to operate their financial and logistical software throughout the remote mining areas of Ghana, they needed a permanent low latency link between all their mining locations. With the Head Office and business server being located in Accra ( Ghana), it was imperative that AMS had real time operational control over their assets, coupled with the need for a quality voice network, the available solutions looked very expensive and over technical.
Spidersat, with their partners Taide / Telenor and Intelsat, developed a full-Meshed solution that would inter-connect all the sites to each other on a single hop, with a latency of only 600ms; thus offering a high quality private voice network with the low latency and reliability to allow excellent performance of the business systems.
A private pool of Shared bandwidth between the sites allowed the monthly ongoing costs to be limited, and with QoS classification and implementation, voice and financial systems were prioritized to ensure optimal user experience.
Performance graphs were provided to AMS, on-line and in real time, to view current and historical traffic patterns, to ensure transparency of all the links and to allow the AMS management to take informed decisions about the growth of their network and future allocation of resources.
Whilst the five-site meshed link offered AMS the private network they desired, a further link was established to the Nittedal earth Station in Norway, where redundant fibre links are operated to the Oslo telehouse and beyond, and so Internet access to the outside world was brought into the network for e-mail and general internet applications.
The roll-out of the network was not without its difficulties, and the lack of facilities throughout the tropical region of Ghana, coupled with the distances between sites made the practical elements of linking the sites concurrently an interesting challenge. Fortunately, AMS were realistic and planned for a 3-site rollout, followed by the addition of a further two sites following a period of consolidation.
The 5 site mesh is now fully operation and adding to the tighter operational control of African Mining Services contract mining activities.
AMS Technical Manager, Paul Farrington, stated that “the meshed system is now fully working as origin ally conceived, and the Spidersat network is now fully operational and delivering the performance we had all hoped for”.
For further information on Spidersat Communications e-mail sales@spidersat.net
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