Lifesaving connectivity: How Life Flight Network stays connected in remote areas with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 21:08:49 +0000

Life Flight Network's reliability at forefront of emergency care

Life Flight Network, the largest not-for-profit air medical transport provider in the United States, epitomizes the critical importance of reliability in emergency medical service. With a steadfast commitment encapsulated by their company promise, “There. When you need us,” they ensure exceptional care, transporting patients with their fleet of helicopters, airplanes, and ground ambulances from accident sites or remote communities, between medical facilities, or to specialists in other states. From the rugged mountains of Montana and the remote backcountry of Idaho to the sprawling plains of Washington and the picturesque Oregon coastline, Life Flight Network’s workforce of over 900 professionals is dedicated to delivering safe and expeditious care.

Seamless communication: Lifeline to critical care

Life Flight Network’s ability to communicate and coordinate seamlessly plays a pivotal role in their life-saving mission. From the moment a dispatch call is received, effective communication ensures crucial details are conveyed accurately and promptly to the pilot and medical crew. This communication is essential for both the highly trained professionals delivering ICU-level care en route and the medical team at the hospital preparing to receive the patient. This allows all teams to prepare and ensure swift adaptation to changing circumstances, including pilots and transport crews who are navigating transport efficiency amid varying weather conditions and flight logistics.

Inside Life Flight Network's network infrastructure

Life Flight Network operates a sophisticated infrastructure designed to ensure uninterrupted communication and access to critical resources across its numerous aircraft bases and operational sites. Facilitating communication between different base networks is pivotal, particularly for their systems like radio over IP used in their dispatch centers.

Additionally, their network supports critical applications such as Flight Vector and Rescue Net, instrumental in tracking flights, facilitating real-time decision-making, and managing billing processes. Life Flight Network operates a hub-and-spoke topology, with their hub in Beaverton, Oregon, which extends connections to all their sites through point-to-point VPN connections.

In a bid to accommodate their continued growth, the organization is embarking on a transition journey, migrating their on-premises footprint into Azure. This strategic move underscores their commitment to evolving with technological advancements while maintaining the high standards of reliability and performance crucial for their life-saving operations.

How Bigleaf supports Life Flight Network's critical missions

Bigleaf emerges as a transformative solution in Life Flight Network’s network infrastructure, addressing challenges with remarkable efficacy. Through features like same IP failover, Life Flight Network achieves unparalleled reliability, seamlessly transitioning between circuits without disrupting operations or compromising connectivity. Leveraging public IPs provided by Bigleaf further enhances network stability and simplifies configuration processes, ensuring consistent performance across operational sites.

In managing VPN traffic, Bigleaf ensures it rides the most stable circuit while providing redundancy and failover for the VPN when a circuit goes down or degrades (without dropping the session) and prioritizes traffic type within the VPN tunnels—delivering stability otherwise unachievable when dependent on the performance of the public internet.

Bigleaf’s simplicity and reliability are hallmarks of its effectiveness in Life Flight Network’s operations. With Bigleaf, there’s no need for intricate configurations or constant monitoring; it simply works. “I really appreciate the simplicity of Bigleaf,” says Jonathan Knowles, Life Flight Network’s network engineer. “The entire network team is comprised of my manager and me; not having another thing I need to worry about or babysit is awesome.”

Bigleaf Wireless Connect: Elevating Life Flight's Network’s reliability in underserved areas

Bigleaf Wireless Connect adds to Life Flight Network’s arsenal of network solutions, providing essential redundancy and reliability particularly in areas where traditional connections are limited, but core operations and services are primarily centered. “Most of our bases are positioned in rural locations where, if someone were to have a horrible accident, you know, the worst day of their life, we would be able to get to them and then to a hospital much faster than with ground transport,” Knowles describes.

Historically, Life Flight Network relied on point-to-point wireless solutions, but these often proved unreliable, with connections frequently dropping in and out unpredictably. More recently, the company has deployed Starlink in some of their locations as a primary circuit.

Bigleaf Wireless Connect offers a cost-effective and flexible solution for Life Flight Network’s diverse connectivity needs. “It’s absolutely crucial for us to have different flavors of connectivity because we can’t always get a hardline connection,” says Knowles. “We have such eclectic locations, from metro areas with millions of people to places that barely have a post office. To have another tool for backup is really great.”

Knowles further elaborates, “We’ve used other solutions but that adds another pane of glass to manage; whereas Wireless Connect is not only more affordable, but it’s managed by Bigleaf, which is more performant, in my opinion.”

With Bigleaf Wireless Connect, Life Flight Network gains peace of mind knowing that they have a robust backup solution in place, enhancing their overall network reliability and ensuring continuity of life-saving operations.

Experience transformation with Bigleaf and Bigleaf Wireless Connect

Unlock the transformative potential of Bigleaf and Bigleaf Wireless Connect to improve network reliability and performance. Enable uninterrupted operations, even in the most challenging environments.

Do you have limited connectivity options? Contact us for a demo and learn how Bigleaf Wireless Connect can help.

NEW! Bigleaf Wireless Connect

Amy Chan — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Empower your business with uninterrupted connectivity

Bigleaf is synonymous with optimized network connectivity and known for seamless failover in the event of a service outage, brownout, or other instability. We take your connectivity very seriously and want to make sure your business experiences minimal downtime, so your teams continue to run productively. With our new Bigleaf Wireless Connect service, we’re providing a new way to help you stay connected to your customers and your applications.

What is Bigleaf Wireless Connect?

Bigleaf Wireless Connect provides 5G cellular plans delivered through a dual-SIM mobile router. Designed to work with Bigleaf’s routers, Wireless Connect can be added to any Bigleaf service plan to work with your primary connection to provide business continuity.

Both 20 GB and 100 GB plans are available. The 20 GB is designed for failover, allowing you to take advantage of Bigleaf’s often-replicated-but-never-duplicated same-IP address failover, ensuring sensitive session-based calls, like VoIP and video conferences stay online even during internet outages. The 100 GB plan can be set for backup failover, or it can be set to load balance specific traffic classes to increase application reliability and performance.

Why Bigleaf Wireless Connect?

There are many wireless connectivity solutions already available in the market today, from unlimited data plans to Cradlepoint routers. The good news is that most of these options can already be paired with Bigleaf to deliver connectivity and failover. However, our customers have shared with us that evaluating, acquiring, and managing these additional products and services from multiple vendors is time consuming and an administrative chore.

With Wireless Connect, we’ve brought together a mobile router and the option of two straightforward data plans that can be added on to any Bigleaf service plan, whether it’s a new deployment or for a site with Bigleaf already in place. These plans are set up so there will never be any overage fees. Wireless Connect is also managed by Bigleaf, which means service agreements, billing, and technical support are all handled by our team—eliminating the extra time and effort often needed to work with additional vendors.

Your business can’t run without internet, and Wireless Connect presents an affordable, easy, and effective solution to ensuring uninterrupted connectivity across multiple sites, with:

A secondary connection that enables application performance optimization and downtime mitigation through Bigleaf’s same IP failover, real-time circuit monitoring, dynamic QoS, and intelligent load balancing
Convenient, single-vendor billing
No overage fees
Plug-and-play setup for reliable, high-speed 5G connectivity
Dual SIM support for multiple-carrier coverage options
24×7 one-stop, top-rated technical support

When to Install Bigleaf Wireless Connect?

Bigleaf Wireless Connect delivers high-speed, wireless internet that is ideal to ensure business continuity, especially in areas where wired ISP options may be limited.

Wireless Connect is also ideal when you need a “just-in-time” internet connection, like when you’re setting up a new office and waiting for your wired lines to be installed. Wireless Connect plans ship with pre-provisioned hardware equipped with pre-installed SIM cards and your selected data plan already activated for quick setup and connectivity. Then, as soon as your primary circuits are connected, Wireless Connect can immediately become your secondary, failover, or line for load balancing line.

Dependability meets simplicity

This business-ready internet will keep your applications running flawlessly, ensuring high productivity, with plug-and-play simplicity. As a hassle-free solution for any business that needs affordable failover and redundancy, or as a stopgap for businesses awaiting a wired installation.

Bigleaf Wireless Connect isn’t just a backup solution; it’s a lifeline for your business operations. Minimize downtime worries, safeguard your operations, keep your applications running smoothly, and ensure your team stays productive.

Learn more about how Bigleaf Wireless Connect can benefit your business today!

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