In July, Dean Birdsall, a Senior Network Engineer, traveled to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia where his experience, knowledge, and professionalism were key factors in the successful design, implementation, and setup of the network technology at the corporate headquarters of Xenel International for Sonic Telecom.  Xenel International (www.xenel.com), under the direction of Sheik Alireza, is a consolidated group of fourteen companies, making it one of the largest organizations in Saudi Arabia.

WirelessTEK and Sonic Telecom designed approximately 20 Virtual Local Area Networks between fourteen remote sites to access Xenel’s corporate resources such as data and audio-video teleconferencing and to achieve fast satellite Internet and email access.

Dean implemented network communications between Xenel's corporate headquarter and their remote companies using laser (wireless) LightPointe 155Mb bridges and E-1 technologies for the Wide Area Network.  A total of fourteen laser LightPointes where linked to the corporate office's Cisco 6509

core switch using fiber optic, and a number of E-1s where utilized for long distance sites linked to the corporate office's Cisco 3600 router.

Approximately 40 additional Cisco 2900/3500 distribution switches, routers, and other devices were installed to complete this task, and another 60 preexisting devices were reconfigured in a record time of just two weeks.

The 155Mb wireless network provided Xenel with extremely fast bandwidth for their network, which was primarily needed to run their custom SAP applications.  Eventually, Xenel will utilize Sonic’s ATM network to link into London and U.S. networks.

The next step is this project will be for WirelessTEK to remotely monitor and maintain the entire Xenel international network.