Carpenter Oak live and breathe timber framed buildings, large and small, and they love a challenge. They create truly unique frames that respond to the client’s brief giving them a bespoke ‘made to measure’ and personalised solution to their brief and budget.

In 1995 they established their main yard in rural Devon and staff numbers began to grow. Every company expects growing pains, but it really was a pain for Carpenter Oak as their yard location had one major problem… poor internet connectivity.

Over the years they tried many different options including standard ADSL & bonded ADSL. FTTC became available in the local village but would not be available at the yard. They started to investigate EFM and leased lines, but they quickly realised that the excess construction charges from Openreach would reach into the tens of thousands of pounds. Clearly not an option.

Their only option for a semi-stable solution was a single 4G modem that all site traffic would run over. This has the issue of contention to the mobile mast that they were connected to and also as with all mobile data, there are download caps to negotiate.

The solution? At Grapevine we like to think out of the box a little so proposed a point to point wireless solution. We asked if they had any other property in the local area that might be able to get FTTC. They came up with a residential property of one of their key men in the business. His house was located on the other side of the river; 2.5 KM as the bird flies.

Following connectivity checks, the property was able to get FTTC 80:20 – this was the perfect location from that point of view. The next challenge was to check that there was clear line of sight between the yard and the residential property. Leveraging our powerful desktop survey tools, we found that yes, it did indeed have a clear line of sight. Sorted!

We installed 2x 80:20 FTTC into the house, then used a wireless point to point link to send this connectivity 2.5 km though the air up to the yard.  Additionally, we installed two multi WAN Peplink routers, one at the house end and one at the yard. These were used so that traffic would load-balance across the two FTTC connections at the house and the other Peplink would connect the point to point link on WAN1 with the existing 4G modem on WAN2 for failover should there be any issues with the wireless link.   

The client can shape the traffic using the Peplink routers how they wish by using load balancing rules. The Peplinks can also be activated to allow up to 5 WAN connections should additional bandwidth be required in the future.   

This creative use of technology from Grapevine has given Carpenter Oak much needed faster internet connectivity, with 4G resilience back-up built in.  Rural internet at it’s finest.