Our customer, Penny, specialising in Kitchen Design, Bedrooms and Bathrooms was expanding the business premises, taking on an additional showroom across the street. They use Compusoft's Winner CAD software, which has a central customer database of projects. Any team member can access it. Naturally, the customer wanted staff at the new showroom to work seamlessly, accessing the database from the new showroom; and also the manager needs to be able to access the Winner files coming from the new showroom.

We've often installed Remote Desktop for Windows Terminal Server or Citrix, over an internet connection, and that's great for computer applications that aren't too demanding on graphics processing; for Microsoft Word, Excel, email, and the SMART system. But it's far too slow for CAD. The budget didn't extend to digging up the road so how could we solve the problem?

Wireless was our best option, but a standard wireless access point isn't powerful enough and nor reliable enough. None of the wireless products we'd used before would work well enough: the walls and the distance would block too much of the power. We identified a high power wireless bridge built just for the job, mountable externally, and at the right price. We had to apply for a special Ofcom licence for the band: 802.11a 5.8 Ghz Band C. That inspired additional confidence: few people use the band so there's less interference and less congestion.

Some things still weren't ideal. We were restricted where we could mount the antenna so tall lorries would pass through the line of sight. So we weren't sure how it would work in practice

Actually, it works brilliantly. Far better than we expected. We've never noticed a break in the network. We don't need to tweak any settings or manage any issues. Adding a new PC is easy: just plug it into the network. It's not quite as fast as a wired network, but it's plenty fast enough. A happy customer.