Proxim Wireless - Heartland Meat Company

Highlights

Heartland Meat Company implements Proxim’s point to point bridge solutions to connect its main facility to the rest two facilities for data and voice applications with world class uptimes.

After acquiring a third building and moving its headquarters there, Heartland Meat Company faced a communications systems dilemma. The Southern California meat processor and distributor to restaurants needed to create robust data and voice connections between the new headquarters and its other two buildings, especially the nearby inventory/invoicing center. The solution: Proxim Corporation’s Tsunami QuickBridge® unit.

Heartland consolidated its voice and data communications with one QuickBridge® 60 Mbps unit. Heartland Meat first tried out the system as a QuickBridge® beta customer in the summer and was quickly sold on the equipment. The Proxim unit now handles the traffic for 30 computers, 2 gigabytes of digital images a day from its surveillance system and the high volume from two invoicing phones, with these two voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) phones having a negligible impact on the speed of data transmission.

“The installation was fast and easy. We did it ourselves,” says Brandon Marvin, director of information technology for Heartland Meat. “Since we put it in place, we haven’t had one minute of downtime.”

Without QuickBridge®, Heartland Meat would have had to settle for a more costly and piecemeal approach to linking its three buildings. Before adding the third location, the company had been relying on a slow, low-speed wireless system to transmit high-volume invoicing and other data between the inventory center and original headquarters. It planned to switch the system to connect the new headquarters and inventory center, then subscribe to a digital subscriber line (DSL) service for the older headquarters building.

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“The installation was fast and easy. We did it ourselves,”

– Brandon Marvin, director of information technology for Heartland Meat.

It also had been planning to install two ISDN lines to handle the invoice traffic, which would have required monthly connection and router fees as well as a set-up fee, Marvin explains.

Marvin estimates the QuickBridge® system will pay for itself compared to the costs of a cobbled-together approach within a year. “The QuickBridge® gives us a complete solution,” notes Marvin. “We have much higher bandwidth and faster connections, all for a lower cost than any other option.”