Pictured: Ben Kitchin, chief executive HBB
A Dublin telecoms company that made the leap from hosting to broadband provision is enabling businesses and other telcos with broadband starting at a minimum of 700Mbps rising up to 3Gbps.
Host Ireland Business Broadband recently signed a €1.2m deal with Sharp Security in Dublin for the security monitoring telecoms infrastructure for the company’s entire base.
The company uses a technology known as E-Band, or ‘extremely high frequency’ to deploy “fibre in the air” on a point-to-point basis in a similar fashion to how microwave signals traditionally were used only at frequencies of 70GHz to 80GHz.
“The cost of actual fibre meant we couldn’t actually differentiate ourselves from other telcos,” explained HIBS’s CEO Ben Kitchin.
E-band, he explained, uses very narrow laser-like radio waves to communicate between Host Ireland’s clients, who include Vodafone, and base stations.
Symmetrical broadband
It allows more data capacity – because the radio waves are so narrow they do not overlap and the same frequency can be re-used many times at each base station.
Each physical link has a minimum capacity of 700Mbps and according to Kitchin this can go up to 3Gbps.
Unlike cellular technologies like LTE or 4G, E-Band requires fixed infrastructure and an uninterrupted line-of-sight of up to 2km to 3km between base stations.
At entry level the company can provide ordinary businesses with symmetrical speeds of 10.5Mbps up and down.
The privately-owned company’s technology uses 25w of power versus 47w for traditional microwave radios, providing a 47pc reduction in power and avoiding the need for costly civil engineering.
Kitchen says the company is in the process of rolling out the network countrywide.
He said that the E-band technology allows it to undercut other fixed wireless providers by up to 50pc and that the E-band technology is being used by three of the top telecom players in Ireland to provide dedicated enterprise solutions to corporates.
“Instead of them having to put in the link themselves, we hand over at a data centre level,” Kitchin said.
