Instant Site-to-site, Same-subnet over 4G

Earlier in July 2019, a new state-of-the-art National Centre of Excellence for Food Engineering was ready to open at Sheffield Hallam University.

A truly amazing facility, focused on revolutionising the approach to the food industry. Specifically they study how to tackle challenges such as energy waste, productivity, health and lack of a skilled and knowledgeable workforce.

Similarly to way they control and monitor other facilities, the university planned to consolidate the new Centre of Excellence under the same remote building management system.

However, in order for the remote management system to work, it requires network link between the facilities. Additionally, all the system components need to be on the same network subnet (Layer 2). Therefore one of the main UK ISP was commissioned to deliver such link.

When the delivery of the link was delayed by the ISP, the university needed to find a quick solution to establish a secure same-subnet link over an alternative Internet media. For examples Wireless on 4G Internet.

Therefore IT AND GENERAL and its sister company XCommNet were engaged and we were able to delivered just that: a same-subnet secure link (Layer 2 VPN) over a bonded 4G Internet.

In conclusion, this solved the issue of the delayed Internet link from the ISP. Furthermore the university saved the expenses they would have incurred if a manual building management process had to be adopted.