Linking 16 locations nationwide is not an easy task. Just getting your everyday network in place is difficult enough, much less thinking about building a backup network as well. But every terrestrial network eventually falls to harsh weather, a stray backhoe or some other unexpected interruption. Network backup provisions need to be made and they need to be robust enough to keep a business humming, not just squeeze by with a minimal level of service.

That's the problem National Distributing Company had. As a billion dollar plus company and the third largest distributor of wine and spirits in the U.S., the company has 2,500 employees working out of 16 offices in nine states. All of them need connections to the home office in Atlanta, Georgia.

NDC uses Frame Relay for its primary communications network, and a series of leased ISDN lines behind that. The ultimate backup system was a bank of dialup modems. The modems were a bad match for the regular network.

"You had a network that was usually running at data rates between 128 and 512 kbps, trying to operate at 9600 bps," said John Dickson, network administrator for NDC. "And only six locations could communicate at once. So Dickson began investigating alternatives for business continuity. At first he looked at another copper path for backup, but that proved too expensive. The next step was to go to a non-terrestrial backup system, such as satellite. However, he quickly discovered that most, even those from leading vendors, were not going to supply enterprise-caliber levels of availability and reliability.

Eventually Dickson found his answer with ViaSat Managed Broadband Services (MBS), a turnkey, bandwidth-on-demand satellite service.

At NDC headquarters in Atlanta, five ViaSat MBS terminals are daisy-chained to form the hub. Each terminal contains one high-speed modem (at 128 kbps) and two low-speed modems (at 64 kbps). The outdoor equipment is a 2.4-meter antenna and 4-watt RF unit. Each remote site uses a single terminal as the interface to the backup network. The system has enough capacity to connect all sites with 64 to 128 kbps circuits.

"So now if any or all of the terrestrial connections go away, our Cisco routers automatically initiate a satellite call for a circuit," says Dickson. "The switchover is virtually seamless to the user and we are back up in seconds over the satellite, connected to Atlanta. Atlanta has our main servers and connection to the Internet backbone, so it's critical that they be connected to our headquarters there."

Customers like NDC pay for ViaSat MBS much like they would for a cell phone. The company pays a monthly fee per location that includes a monthly allocation of minutes, then pays extra per-minute for any overages. Dickson said he rarely surpasses the base minutes on his plan, even with monthly testing of the circuits. NDC chose to purchase its Immeon network hardware, but the option to lease is also offered.

Behind the scenes at ViaSat are a couple of things that bring the service its competitive edge. One is a 24/7 network operations center, located at ViaSat headquarters in Carlsbad, CA. The center monitors and controls all locations, commissions new sites, provides customer support, and ensures availability of the network. The other is use of ViaSat-exclusive Paired Carrier Multiple Access (PCMA). While most satellite transmissions require separate frequencies to transmit and receive, PCMA combines them into the same bandwidth. A terminal equipped with PCMA recognizes the signal that it sent and simply cancels out that information, leaving it with the information received from the transmitting location.

The bottom line is that PCMA can cut satellite bandwidth needs by as much as half. Along with the ability of ViaSat MBS VSATs to set up satellite circuits on-demand, that lowers the cost of service to levels that make it far more affordable than other satellite communications alternatives.

In fact, because of the affordability of ViaSat MBS, Dickson is exploring the possibility of using it for primary connections to carry lower priority traffic such as email. The service can provide comparable data throughput to Frame Relay and is a little cheaper for those applications, says Dickson.

Has the backup system paid off for National Distributing?

"There have been multiple instances since we installed the network, that the terrestrial connection has been interrupted either by a backhoe or weather," said Dickson. "Recently we had some very bad storms interrupt communications all over Jacksonville. But our ViaSat connections took over and we were processing requests just like normal."

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