Melbourne car dealership Essendon Renault is claiming to have saved thousands of dollars a year by deploying accelerated 4G routers to avoid broadband breakdowns that it says can bring the business to a standstill.
The company, which has branches in North Melbourne and Moonee Ponds, says it has experienced a range of broadband outages or service disruptions that have prevented one, or both, branches from accessing the Internet and, in one case, the switch to Naked ADSL services disrupted Internet access for the next two weeks.
Essendon Renault financial controller Les Hogan says the company is highly reliant on the Internet to operate efficiently, with a state-of-the-art virtual machine cluster serving remote desktop sessions, email and virtualised routing technology and a cloud-based virtual PABX. Both Sales and Service departments rely on real-time Internet access.
If we haven't got that instant communication all the time, then my business just stops, Hogan said.
In sales, we cant find out what models are available in a timely manner and in service, we have to ring you up and say sorry sir, the computer is down, we cant service your car today and thats not good for relationships. So broadband outages do dramatically impact on us. Were at a point where we just cant go back and default to paper it just doesnt work.
Hogan says when Essendon Renault recognised broadband breakdowns were disrupting its business operations, it turned to its technology partner, NPS (Network Professional Services), which deployed Accelerated 6300-CX routers to maintain Internet access through automatic failover to 4G mobile data services.
The Accelerated 6300-CX router has an embedded, carrier-certified cellular modem that provides Internet connectivity via 4G LTE and 3G cellular wireless data networks and the compact devices, designed and developed by a specialist engineering team based in Brisbane.
NPS installed an Accelerated 6300-CX at both Essendon Renault branches, configured to use Telstras 4G network if ADSL-based broadband drops out. NPS controls the 6300-CX routers using the Accelerated View (AView) cloud-based management portal, which can remotely monitor, configure and update from one to more than 1000 Accelerated 6300-CX routers.
According to Hogan, the accelerated 6300-CX routers would pay for themselves during their first use. Theyre not overly expensive devices, he said.
If it can keep us operational for four to six hours, so we can do a days work, the damn things paid for itself. As well as the occasional Internet outage, we do get minor hiccoughs from time to time at one or other of the two dealerships.
Even a short interruption means you become out of balance. So if youre non-operational, youre unable to do your work for two to three hours, then all of a sudden, you have to try and do 15 jobs within two hours and all these people arrive all at the same time.