Hughes Access Continuity service protects leading uniform rental and linen supply company service centers from network outages.

One of the five largest uniform rental and linen supply companies in North America selected the Hughes® Access Continuity Service to protect its service centers across North America from network outages.

The company has grown into a multi-national organization operating over 190 production facilities and service centers throughout the United States and Canada. It supplies uniforms to companies in a variety of industries including automotive, manufacturing, hospitality, food, technology and pharmaceutical.

Hughes is providing a reliable and ubiquitous satellite broadband backup network service for the company’s service centers throughout North America. The Hughes solution backs up the company’s MPLS network, ensuring continuity of network services in case of landline outages.

Reliable, high-speed network backup is critical to operations since more than 150,000 businesses rely on the company to deliver garments weekly. The company’s state-of-the-art RFID and bar-code system tracks exactly where garments are at all times to ensure prompt delivery and great service. A custom developed management system tracks the real-time visibility of each garment to manage inventory control, improve delivery route efficiency and to reduce accounting costs.

According to the company’s manager of Infrastructure and Information Security Officer, the company needed a path diverse satellite-based backup solution since even terrestrial backup networks are vulnerable to the same outages that affect the primary network. The company considered 3G wireless, but quickly ruled it out because of performance and reliability issues.

“Our business and reputation requires on-time deliveries and quick response times. Should a storm, backhoe or other calamity take down our primary network, chances are we’d lose our dial-up backup network as well. Hughes has already proven its mettle by protecting us during several network outages. Hughes not only gives us an always-on backup network service that covers even our most remote service centers, the company was also able to fine-tune network performance to make our garment-tracking applications run at peak performance when the backup failover kicks in.”

Terrestrial network outages are a fact of life, but companies cannot afford to lose revenue from any location when the primary network connection goes down. Hughes Access Continuity Service can quickly bring sites on line and protect companies against significant revenue losses due to network outages.

Satellite—the Only Truly Diverse Path

An effective backup solution for a distributed enterprise landline network should not share any of the same underlying network infrastructure—from remote sites to the central server/data center. A satellite broadband network is the only solution that totally bypasses an enterprise’s primary landline connections and protects a business from costly network outages.