An international railroad company selected GNS to provide best-in-class equipment and professional services to upgrade its private communications network.

The Situation
Because of frequency spectrum reassignment, the customer had to clear the in-use spectrum, modernize the facilities, and expand channel capacity to meet future network demands. The company had to vacate its current 900 MHz band quickly to avoid government-assessed penalties and open these frequencies for GSM cellular operations while continuing complete network operations. In addition, the customer wanted to increase capacity along the main route to handle growing user demands into the next millennium.

The Solution
The customer needed a reliable supplier that was familiar with its operations and could quickly meet the company's objectives. The customer turned to GNS for total end-to-end communications and networking solutions. The project scope included developing a turnkey solution that updated the customer's analog radio communications system to a complete digital, Y2K-compliant, microwave radio communications system. This solution increased channel capacity and ensured reliability.

For this valued customer of more than 20 years, we designed an economical and modern digital system that satisfies the company's immediate and future needs. GNS also supplied, installed, and implemented a private, voice and data network along the customer's entire right-of-way.

To minimize disruption, we installed and tested the new equipment at the existing sites then cut the circuits over from the old to the new microwave equipment.The expertise of GNS information technology professionals and an efficient implementation methodology moved this valued customer to a digital-age network without outages or disruption in revenue-generating services.

The Benefits
Our engineering analysis of the technical problem, ability to deliver a technologically sound approach, and a rapid implementation schedule that incurred little risk met all customer requirements. The GNS approach to the customer's needs produced a new system that more efficiently reallocates channel use and routing, reduces the rising cost of maintaining near obsolete subsystems, and assures compatibility with modern digital alarm and control systems.