Customer & Partner Stories – Bigleaf Networks

NW Towers provides reliable connectivity under the harshest conditions with Bigleaf

Amy Chan — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 00:07:26 +0000

Many of our managed service provider partners support clients who rely on the Internet to run their businesses, yet operate in remote locations with limited internet connectivity options. Northwest Towers definitely fits this bill. Read their story to learn how they use Bigleaf to provide highly reliable, remote connectivity to their clients, even under the harshest conditions.

Partner profile

Northwest Towers designs, constructs, and supports custom wireless networks for extreme deployments around the world. Their clients span a range of industries, including mining, construction, industrial, commercial, and transportation.

Business challenge

Extremely remote locations with limited connectivity options required reliable internet connections to run business-critical tools and systems without disruptions or downtime.

Solution

Bigleaf provides stable and highly performant internet connectivity that enables remote locations to transmit real-time operations data and telemetry to perform their daily operations efficiently.

NW Towers connects remote locations with Bigleaf

NW Towers specializes in building custom wireless networks with internet connections for remote sites. Many of their clients operate open pit mining sites. Other clients include ports, oil and gas, defense, agriculture, and emergency services. All of them are extremely remote.

In particular, mining operations take place far from population centers. In these remote areas, you typically won’t find any internet connectivity: no ISPs, no mobile phone coverage, and not even ancient copper for your old-school, 2400-baud US Robotics relic.

Yet modern mining operations are exceedingly high-tech. Vehicles, payloads, and other machines and systems are constantly producing data and telemetry needed to optimize operations and promote safety. They rely on real-time data reporting from the vehicles and data processing to keep the entire site moving. When these systems stall, idling large vehicles and highly-paid personnel, the cost of downtime is mind-boggling.

Minimizing these disruptions is why businesses turn to NW Towers. They are a service provider that specializes in bringing reliable connections to remote sites.

Every site has a different profile and calls for a different solution, from Starlink to Viasat to ruggedized LTE modems. NW Towers finds a way to provide even for off-grid sites without electricity on premise. They have developed an entirely self-contained solution delivered on a rugged high-tech trailer that’s equipped with a deployable tower, solar panels, and a diesel backup.

With Bigleaf in place, each NW Towers installation can now offer their clients reliable and resilient connections and manage fewer support calls.

Bigleaf Networks ensures reliable connectivity, even in remote locations. Our advanced solutions provide seamless internet access wherever you are.

The NW Towers solution originally relied on multiple redundant connections, supported by a manual or automated failover process. However, when failures occurred, there was often a significant delay before the backup came online. Those delays caused idle time for valuable personnel and equipment. Such an outage could potentially derail schedules and operations. Additionally, switching to the backup system’s IP address would cause applications to fail, resulting in additional delays.

It’s an impressive and valuable solution that brings high-tech capabilities to the most remote and challenging environments. However, the internet connections in such locations are not the most reliable. NW Towers and its clients will do whatever they can to optimize their internet access and prevent costly downtime.

The solution: Last-mile internet redundancy

For these remote sites, NW Towers needed reliable, last-mile internet redundancy with failover that was not just automated, but transparent to both the local network and the remote connection.

Bigleaf proved to be a perfect solution. Because the Bigleaf Cloud Access Network encapsulates all network traffic in a cloud-based overlay tunnel, clients maintain the same static public IP address regardless of which connection is in use. The remote locations stay connected even during and after a failover.

In addition, Bigleaf Zero-Touch Setup meant that NW Towers was able to ship Bigleaf SD-WAN routers to each remote site. Installation is quick and painless—even with the variations in connectivity solutions used by each client.

The cost of downtime is mind-boggling

With Bigleaf in place, each NW Towers installation can now offer their clients reliable and resilient connections and manage fewer support calls. Sites can transmit telemetry and reporting data in real time, even when their network connections aren’t performing optimally, or even when one fails.

This real-time delivery of telemetry data contributes to business-critical operational insights and helps improve worker safety.

Additionally, intelligent load balancing and Bigleaf Dynamic QoS provide stable, optimal bandwidth while minimizing latency across all available internet connections for each remote site. It’s a whole new level of performance and reliability for NW Towers’ clients.

The future of emergency services

Along with their mining clients, NW Towers plans to introduce Bigleaf into other exciting applications. They envision a future where their pre-packaged solution can be rapidly deployed for emergency services. When natural disasters and humanitarian crises strike, reliable power and internet connections can be some of the most fragile infrastructure elements. Without reliable connectivity, emergency services can falter.

With power and internet in one rugged trailer, service and emergency crews will be more effective and faster than ever. They’ll be able to transmit live video and receive data, like maps and architectural drawings of a site, that will help them respond more quickly to crises, reduce damage to property and infrastructure, prevent further harm, and save lives.

Need highly reliable connectivity at remote locations? Contact us to get started.

Creating a resilient network: Q&A with Lionakis IT Director Matthew Onken

Bigleaf Networks — Sat, 17 Oct 2020 02:59:00 +0000

In today’s environment, having a dependable, resilient network with redundancies and prioritization is a “no-brainer”. We sat down for a fireside chat with Matthew Onken, IT Director for Lionakis, a century-old architecture and engineering firm in Sacramento, CA. Onken researched and implemented a network continuity solution and justified the investment to the Lionakis management team. Onken offers insider tips and insights into the hidden benefits of dashboards and network visibility.

Matrix learns the secrets of a cloud-ready network

Amy Chan — Wed, 22 May 2019 15:41:14 +0000

How to build a cloud-ready network

Matrix Networks got its start in 1984 supporting and installing PBX phone systems. Over the years, the company’s embrace of internet technologies and cloud computing solutions has helped its customers navigate a constantly evolving network landscape.

Matrix Networks attributes this success to the company’s principled approach to cloud-ready network solutions based on three decades of experience.

In an interview with Bigleaf, Kyle Holmes, president of Matrix Networks, explained the company’s strategies for moving customers to the cloud.

As companies shift their businesses to the cloud, what are some of the things you’re seeing?

A lot of people don’t realize they are already in the cloud. In fact, many of them are farther along on their cloud journeys than they think they are. That’s because every business application is moving to the cloud. Every application on a desktop has a web version today. That has resulted in an increase in IT sprawl, as the cloud makes it easy for individual departments to make their own buying decisions.

Is there a secret formula you’ve found for building a cloud-ready network?

There’s a right way to build a cloud-ready network. We call it Matrix Connectivity as a Service (MCaaS). Through a combination of purposeful network design, disparate circuit sourcing, and SD-WAN optimization, we’re able to intelligently manage a customer’s internet bandwidth. From carrier-agnostic circuit sourcing to built-in, company-wide redundancy, 24/7 support and monitoring, and consolidated billing, MCaaS has simplified the way our clients experience connectivity, allowing them to focus on what matters: their business.

We’ve had a lot of success because we’re principled about our approach to what it takes to build a cloud-ready network. Customers want something easy that just works and they want one partner for their connectivity strategy. It’s why our MCaaS is so popular. It’s what our customers want because it’s everything they need in one package with one bill.

What role does SD-WAN play in the solutions you deliver to clients?

In many client engagements, we’re seeing SD-WAN displace existing MPLS networks because SD-WAN delivers better reliability, more speed, and cloud access. And beyond the technical benefits, SD-WAN makes it easy for company IT managers to migrate their applications on private networks to the cloud, giving their own customers — the users — better speed, reliability, and access flexibility. It’s always good to remember there’s usually a human at the other end of your solution and anything you can do to make their life easier is a good thing.

Are companies you work with aware of SD-WAN or is this something you introduce to them?

A couple of years ago, if you mentioned SD-WAN to someone it would be the first time they had ever heard of it. Today, everyone’s heard of it, but nobody understands it. That’s largely due to the fact that there’s a lot of market confusion around the term where people think they’ve got what they need and they really don’t.

SD-WAN is a broad term that means different things to different people. In our case, customers don’t come looking for SD-WAN, but we’re able to show them why they need it.

Your approach to SD-WAN is different than a lot of companies in the market.

For us, SD-WAN takes on two plays: One, we took a hard stand to require SD-WAN in every UCaaS solution we sell. That’s non-negotiable for us. Because deploying UCaaS without SD-WAN is like driving a car without a seatbelt.

The other is as an MPLS displacement where companies are migrating applications to the cloud from a private network and realize they suddenly have different security and reliability requirements.

What makes Bigleaf different?

There are three network connectivity types: site-to-site, cloud-based, and hybrid SD-WAN. Companies can live off a single dumb pipe and hope nothing goes wrong. But we all know that networks inevitably go down. Or they can create a better experience using SD-WAN.

Bigleaf falls right in that cloud SD-WAN sweet spot. There aren’t many that do, fewer that do it well, and none that were built specifically for the cloud like Bigleaf.

To put it bluntly, Bigleaf is an upgrade to the internet. Bigleaf allows companies to migrate to the cloud with minimal changes to their network or existing firewall infrastructure. It’s simple and it works. And that’s why we’ve made it a mandatory part of our offering and also why it sells so well.

What advice would you give to others?

It’s easy to fall prey to the marketing around the cloud and SD-WAN. You need to find a partner who has sifted through the sand for you. When you find that partner, pay attention to the dashboard experience they offer. Visibility is important.

And remember, carrier networks go down. Don’t be dependent on just one. When CenturyLink went down last year, 80% of our clients were on their network. None of them called us. And a big reason they didn’t was because they had Bigleaf as part of the solution we built for them.