Customized Solution: Ponzi Vineyards
Ponzi Vineyards is located in the Oregon’s lush Willamette Valley Southwest of Portland, Oregon. The Ponzi family, now in its second generation of stewardship, has practiced continuous innovation, providing its customers not only with superb wines, but also a complete “wine tourist” experience for visitors to its various facilities in the Willamette Valley. Ponzi Vineyards ships its fine wines to wine aficionados throughout the entire country.
To mange its rapidly-growing business, Ponzi Vineyards not only needed Internet access from each of its five major locations in the Willamette Valley, but also “Intranet” access between the facilities to exchange large graphics files, database access, accounting, and other typical line-of-business applications.
Ponzi Vineyards was using satellite terminals for its intra-facility communications. The performance of Intranet applications was unacceptable due largely to the nearly 1 second of latency induced by multiple satellite links, and each satellite terminal cost 500/month. To solve the performance issues, Ponzi Vineyards explored the possibility of a dedicated T-1 Internet access line to its main business office collocated with their Winery.
Ponzi Vineyards contacted Freewire Broadband in Portland to see if Freewire Broadband could provide a more cost-effective and complete solution than a T-1 line to Ponzi Vineyards’ main business office and continued use of satellite terminals for intra-facility communications.
Solution
Freewire Broadband designed and installed a system consisting of a high-capacity wireless Internet link to the Ponzi Vineyards Winery, and a dedicated point-to-multipoint wireless system from the Winery to three of the four other major Ponzi Vineyards facilities. The installation cost of the customized Freewire Broadband wireless system was approximately the same as the projected installation cost of the T-1 line.
More importantly, the ongoing operating expense for Freewire Broadband to provide Intranet/Internet service to all five Ponzi Vineyard facilities is the same as the projected operating expense of the T-1 line to the main business office. Not only does Ponzi Vineyards now have superb Intranet connectivity between their facilities and a corresponding increase in their overall productivity, but Ponzi Vineyards will save approximately $2000/month (the avoided cost of four satellite terminals @ $500/month).
Summary
With the successful completion of the Ponzi Vineyards project, Freewire Broadband once again demonstrated its flexibility, cost-effectiveness of its Internet Access services, and its ability to provide complete solutions to customer requirements.