Acorn Broadband provides broadband services to homes and businesses, helping underserved communities with services to enable them to progress towards a digital future.

“We start our networks with a cost-effective topology and design using network equipment with wider beam widths allowing us to cover large areas very quickly and efficiently,” explains company owner, Jack Raeburn.

“This approach allows us to scale up a new network to cover a much larger area while having the ability to carry enough traffic and bandwidth to get the first customers online without much risk, until we know where the demand hotspots will appear and where the higher bandwidth is going to be required.”

Acorn Broadband opted to use RF elements’ solutions, available through MiRO, which Raeburn says allowed them to triple and quadruple its wireless last mile network throughput.

“Using the unique horn antennas with narrower beam width, unique coverage and superior interference immunity, allows us to use 5GHz unlicensed spectrum much more efficiently, even re-using channels that before was not possible,” continues Raeburn. “This has enabled us to continue growing in high interference areas while also giving us the ability to offer faster services to clients.

“Installation has been a breeze and this solution has given us the ability to scale our customer base without limitations and provide our client base with a constantly improving and broader service offering.

“At the end of the day our customers are the entirety of our company and therefore they must be at the core of everything we do moving forward. Serving them as best as possible is the absolute priority.”

RF elements antennas was selected due to the experience and success Acorn Broadband has had with RF elements in Europe. When the time came for Acorn Broadband to take the next step in South Africa, they knew exactly what a massive difference RF elements antenna can make to 5GHz networks, especially in high density areas with RF interference.

“We do everything in-house,” says Raeburn, “and we are lucky to have all the skills we need here to develop and progress the solutions our network needs as we expand, through each and every phase.

“We have been mainly using the RF elements 30 degree horns for point to multi-point (PtMP) and the UltraDish for point to point (PtP) deployments. The horn antennas come in their narrowest form at 30 degrees and we opt for this mainly due to the additional gain the narrower beam width gives us. Replacing what is mainly 90-degree sector antennas for horns is an immediate minimum of three times the throughput, however they work alongside each other very effectively too so there is no real limit to deploying as many horns as we need in a particular direction to continue to increase throughput.”

Raeburn says they have deployed the UltraDish on many of Acorn Broadband’s higher traffic 5GHz links very successfully. This is often the last step before changing over links to licensed spectrum. He says this is more cost-effective than a licensed solution and therefore delays great investment across its networks.

Raeburn says that progress was measured through quality of service and throughput and that Acorn Broadband has managed to significantly reduce the level of complaints about its network to almost zero, so even the call centre is seeing the benefits from a customer care point of view.

“We also do not anticipate much ongoing support as the RF elements antennas are not a particularly wearing part and they simply do as they say,” comments Raeburn. “Every time we have towers ready for the next step we return to the proven solution, over and over again because it absolutely meets our requirements.”

“My advice to someone else or someone new to the industry planning a similar project would be that if you need more throughput on the wireless network, the RF elements antenna solutions are the best on the market, particularly for PtMP – and this is the area where WISPs struggle the most.

“MiRO’s assistance and performance has also been great and we would definitely recommend MiRO to industry peers,” he concludes.

Further information about Acorn Broadband can be found on www.acornbroadband.com and to buy the full range of RF elements antennas online, visit www.miro.co.za