IMountain Case Study: Connecting neighbors, businesses, schools, clinics, and families to each other and the world

By Dori Erann 3 min read

“We have wireless infrastructure that is second to none and far exceeds the capabilities of many communities. Ceragon offers us fast, reliable, affordable and, most importantly, secure connectivity for all our customers.” - Eddie Maendel, Engineering Lead for IMountain LLC

In the beautiful Hudson Valley of New York, IMountain LLC was looking to grow its business, which included interlinking the campuses of a demanding customer that has schools, a factory, medical and dental offices, homes, and businesses. The customer built their first wireless network in the 1990s and had evolved though several generations and manufacturers of wireless gear. In 2018, they turned to IMountain and Ceragon to completely replace 12 links from various manufacturers.

Challenges

The technical team was looking for a solution that could connect long distances of over 25 miles, was scalable enough to start with only a few links and then grow to add new locations and replace fiber in several areas, and that was futureproof – meaning the technology could be easily upgraded and has a long life cycle, which would thereby protect their investment.

Due to the frequent thunderstorms and lightning strikes common in their area, the customer needed a microwave solution that could protect against the effects of lightning, without going over the budget.

Ceragon’s split mount solutions allow sensitive network and software functions to be housed and safeguarded in a compact Indoor Unit that is rack mounted in-building. Meanwhile, the radio-frequency (RF) Unit is mounted on the tower with the antenna, but connected to the Indoor Unit over fiber - which is more easily protected against lightning than LMR or Cat 5 cable solutions from other vendors.

The Solution

The end customer, in conjunction with IMountain’s technical team, selected the Ceragon IP-20A The new network project is nearly complete, and the team is currently working on installing a link over especially challenging terrain up in the Catskill Mountains. At the core of the network is a recently acquired unused AT&T tower which relays several long-distance 11 GHz links, each with multi-gigabit capacity.  

The onsite businesses and factory use several time-sensitive and high-capacity applications. It was very important that Ceragon could provide an extremely low-latency solution - and we did. The data center leverages the high bandwidth and low latency to handle the growing pace of interactive and real-time requests by applications and users throughout the community.

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