A big Mimosa shout out to Go Wireless NZ, our New Zealand distributor, for sharing a great case study about how one Papakura Auckland resident’s quest for high-speed internet blossomed into a community service.

GoWirelessNZ recently connected us with Richard Bolscher, a 28-year old resident of Clevedon, a rural town in Auckland, New Zealand. With a passion for tinkering with electronics and an early fascination with wireless gear, Bolscher and his cousin wondered whether they could connect their two homes 23 km apart. Given the mountainous terrain and distance between the homes, Bolscher decided to put his passion for wireless technology to the test and embarked on an experiment to build his first point-to-point wireless link.

As Bolscher tells the story, “We decided to take advantage of the fiber at my cousin’s home, and started by strapping a donated WiFi antenna onto the roof of his home and went for a drive up a few of the local mountains to search for the signal. As we were driving up the second mountain, we picked up the signal with an antenna sitting on the back seat. We found a nearby house under construction and asked the owner if he wanted free wireless internet service in exchange for using his land and power. He was happy to accept as he didn't have any high-speed internet option at the time. The location turned out to be a perfect height and provided line-of-sight to both locations.”

The initial experiment proved successful enough to not only connect the two cousins, but others in the neighboring area as well. Donated equipment worked well for a proof of concept, but as Bolscher increased the number of users on the network, he began to experience issues with low speeds and dropped links.

When Bolscher decided to get serious about his network, he turned to Go Wireless NZ and upgraded to Mimosa B5 backhaul radios. “Reliability was of the utmost importance for us,” said Bolscher. “Now I can sleep easier. Speeds are much faster and file transfers don’t saturate the link as they did previously. We are finally enjoying the benefits of our hybrid-fiber-wireless network at full speed!”

Bolscher found mounting and aligning the Mimosa radios straightforward, and used Mimosa’s spectrum analyzer to select a suitable channel, even in the noisy 5 GHz spectrum. “Everything worked well straight out of the box—even for a first timer, setup is very straightforward,” said Bolscher.

Most importantly, Bolscher was impressed with the fiber-fast speed of the Mimosa solutions to deliver critical bandwidth to 55+ devices amongst his neighborhood subscribers. “It's really unbelievable that wireless has developed so much over the past few years. Mimosa solutions are able to give us fiber speeds reliably and cost-effectively, and perform much faster than I had ever imagined.”

Mimosa and Go Wireless NZ are thrilled at the success of Bolscher’s experiment, and look forward to supporting the growth of his business and other service provider customers in the New Zealand territory. For more information about how you can grow your own wireless broadband network, or on becoming an authorized Mimosa Reseller in New Zealand, please contact sales@gowifi.co.nz. For further information about Mimosa's partners worldwide, please visit http://mimosa.co/partners