Let’s rewind a bit…
Last month, I had Will Goodall, Head of Wholesale for GigaBritain, in our studio to discuss everything channel-related and, of course, the new GigaBritain brand and how they’re supporting resellers with all things connectivity. During our conversation, we touched on their Wireless Ethernet offering.
Being the inquisitive soul that I am, I put Will on the spot and asked if he could let me visit a rooftop to get a better understanding of how it all worked!
Fast forward to early July, and I made it to the roof! Now, you’d think choosing July for a visit would ensure our best chances for a bright sunny day. You can picture it: the sun glistening off London’s skyscrapers onto Will’s booming smiley face—it’s a content maker’s dream!
But this is the UK. We had quite the opposite.
We had dark clouds and a drizzle of rain.
As a juicy bonus, Will has a large fear of heights.
So, what could possibly go wrong?
Now, before diving into the rooftop adventure and explaining exactly why Wireless Ethernet is such a popular product among resellers, let’s give you some background…
For the last fifteen years, a company called Luminet (whom many of you will be familiar with) has been installing equipment on London rooftops to provide Wireless Ethernet to thousands of businesses through their loyal partner base. In October 2023, Telcom Group acquired Luminet.
It was a perfect move for Telcom. They had been planning to enter the wholesale space for twelve months prior, and the acquisition gave them a solid foundation to launch into the channel!
After the acquisition was announced, GigaBritain was born. GigaBritain is the wholesale brand to Telcom Group and it’s been gaining huge traction with the channel with its unique products and culture—read more about that here.
Now that you’re all caught up, let’s jump back to London in early July with the lovely British weather. GigaBritain has over 500 rooftops with wireless equipment, and we chose the iconic Tower 42. With 42 floors (who would have guessed?), it sits 19th as the tallest building in London (although, when the equipment was first installed, it was seventh).
To cut a long story short, we made it to the roof with a few tears (Will) and a few slightly out-of-breath middle-aged males.
Now let’s get into the product…
To start, before connectivity can be “beamed,” it needs a chunky wired Ethernet connection (10GB using 24-core fibre, to be exact) terminating into the building and then cabled to the rooftop. Getting to the comms room (four floors below the roof) is pretty straightforward (skyscrapers tend to have decent ducting for blowing fibre)—the challenging part is terminating the core, four floors above, onto the roof (enter GigaBritain’s amazing engineers).
Once the connection is established, it’s terminated into an “antenna” to beam the solution wirelessly to the receiving client (a business somewhere in London that has a line of sight to the main antenna).
There are two types of products with Wireless Ethernet:
- Point to Point: One antenna to one customer, offering up to 10GB. It must point directly to the receiving property. The connection is still uncontended and comes with an Ethernet-based SLA. In the image below, you can see a secure “pole” with multiple antennas, each for one customer. The video shows around 40 of these direct units on the rooftop.
- Point to Multipoint: A lower bandwidth service with all the same elements—wireless, encrypted. It’s ideal for everyday businesses requiring speeds up to 100Mbps. It has the same benefits as the Point to Point product but comes with less bandwidth and less cost.
Onto the USPs…
- Reliability: Unmatched, with a history of military use worldwide. It’s unaffected by weather and comfortably provides 10GB up to ten kilometers away.
- Security: Uses AES128-bit encryption, making it extremely secure. Being “not in the ground” eliminates issues of vandalism or accidental digging through fibre.
- Resilience: Many resellers install the “Wireless Ethernet” before the wired Ethernet solution is installed. This allows them to get their end users connected and billing within ten working days! But here’s the kicker—once the wired connection has been installed, many resellers opt to keep the wireless as a backup. The service automatically switches if an outage occurs, providing a 100% uptime solution. GigaBritain calls this “always on.”
- Lead times: Both services can be deployed within ten working days, with instances of delivery in just 24 hours when required. GigaBritain has repeatedly saved the day for large organisations left without connectivity in the city of London. That’s what you tend to find in general with GigaBritain; they really have the “can-do attitude.” If you need a favor, they will always try to see what can be done. We like that.
Impressively, the solution may one day soon be able to deliver larger amounts of bandwidth too—for example, 20GB or 50GB or even possibly 100GB. The only limitations are the current technologies within the hardware. Many manufacturers are currently trailing 10GB+ kits, so as soon as it’s released, GigaBritain will be ready to adopt it.
It’s also worth noting that they are continuing to branch out the wireless product across all of their “Hyper Cities.” Will explained in the video, wherever they’re laying fibre, they’re looking to adopt rooftop space to accompany the wireless product. The latest city to be released will be Cardiff, to accompany London, Manchester, and Birmingham.
I hope you enjoy the video. Keep an eye out for more rooftop content being released within the next few weeks; I get to talk about the nitty-gritty with industry legend Jon Barnes!
If you want to speak to GigaBritain about reselling the wireless product (or their FTTP and Ethernet offering), you can complete the form below, which is fed directly into their team.
