Linking Isolated Rural Areas Without Landlines

It's hard to imagine any place that's more remote than the Australian Outback. Given that 90 percent of Australians live in urban areas along the coastline, the ten percent or so who reside in the country's interior are spread far and few between.

Seven-hundred kilometers inland from the Queensland coast lies Longreach, a town of approximately 3,000 inhabitants. When the state government decided to amalgamate rural Local Government Areas, Longreach was merged with two other jurisdictions into the Longreach Regional Council, whose 40,638 square kilometers (approximately 15,690 square miles) contain just 4,700 people.

After the amalgamation, it was decided that in order to maintain proper public services across such a large territory, all pre-existing local government offices would continue to be maintained, although they would now be subordinate to the Council's headquarters in the town of Longreach. The challenge, however, was that the desktops in those disparate offices would have to be connected to Longreach even though landline infrastructure did not exist and a wireless solution would be hampered by the lack of a line of sight.

For that reason, R.V.C., a RAD partner in Australia, suggested linking Council offices by installing RAD's Airmux-400 wireless multiplexers. The Airmux-400 is a carrier-class broadband multiplexer that can deliver both native Ethernet and TDM services over a single wireless link in sub-6 GHz frequencies. The high-capacity Airmux-400 radio system provides net throughput of up to 100 Mbps and a range of up to 120 kilometers (75 miles).

“Everybody said it wouldn't work because there's no line of sight, so local officials agreed to have install it only as long as we would take it down if it wouldn't function,” states Ian Donald, Queensland Regional Manager. “But now they're convinced,” he adds. “They're all estatic.”