Metro Wireless
Case Studies

Holland Hospital deployed a bonded Starlink & 5G internet access solution with three Static IPs

Enabling mission-critical connectivity in rural healthcare via bonded Starlink + 5G

Starlink

Holland Hospital deployed a bonded Starlink & 5G internet access solution with three Static IPs to ensure perfect uptime.

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Overview

Holland Hospital is a leading regional medical center whose life-critical operations— including Electronic Health Records (EHR), medical imaging, telehealth services, and critical communications— are entirely dependent on uninterrupted, high-speed internet. While their primary enterprise-grade fiber connection was reliable, the hospital's IT leadership recognized it as a single point of failure, vulnerable to rare but disruptive urban outages.

To eliminate this risk, Metro Wireless deployed a MetroBONDX2 solution, a professionally managed, bonded system combining Starlink and 5G to provide instantaneous, automatic failover. This tailored setup, complete with dedicated Static IPs and full management by our Network Operations Center, now ensures unparalleled uptime and network confidence, safeguarding all critical patient care functions from any potential internet outage.

Holland Hospital is a leading regional medical center providing comprehensive healthcare services to its community.

The Challenge

Holland Hospital's primary internet connection was a reliable enterprise-grade fiber line. However, recognizing that fiber networks can experience rare but disruptive outages due to construction accidents, equipment failure, or local node issues, the hospital's IT leadership sought a robust, automatic failover solution. Their requirements were specific:

  1. Seamless failover: An immediate and automatic secondary connection must take over during any primary fiber outage with zero downtime.
  1. Professional installation & management: The solution required a certified, professional installation and ongoing management to ensure integration with existing network infrastructure, compliance with hospital IT security policies, and to free up their internal IT team.
  1. Static IPs: Three Static IPs were necessary for hosting internal servers, secure remote access, and maintaining consistent VPN connections for staff.
  1. Urban reliability: The solution needed to perform reliably in an urban environment, potentially dealing with signal obstructions or network congestion.

Traditional wireline failover, such as coax or DSL, was deemed insufficient due to slow speeds and high latency, which would cripple modern medical applications.

The Solution: 

MetroBONDX2 with professional installation:

Metro Wireless engineered a tailored MetroBONDX2 bonding solution to act as the hospital's dedicated failover internet pathway.

  1. Dual wireless uplinks: The setup combines the power of one Starlink satellite dish and one high-performance 5G modem from a separate cellular carrier. 

    This dual-WAN approach ensures redundancy within the redundancy; if one wireless connection had an outage, the other maintains the connection via SD-WAN.
  1. Intelligent bonding appliance: The heart of the system is the MetroBONDX2 SD-WAN appliance. It continuously monitors the performance of both the primary fiber line and the two wireless connections. 

    The moment the fiber link fails, the Peplink SD-WAN appliance instantly and seamlessly routes all traffic through the bonded Starlink + 5G connection without dropping a single data packet.
  1. Professional installation & Static IPs: A certified Metro Wireless technician conducted an on-site survey to evaluate optimal mounting positions for the 5G antenna and Starlink dish, ensuring the strongest possible signal strength.

    The technician then integrated the system with the hospital's core network router, configured the three required Static IP addresses on the bonded connection, and tested the failover process to ensure a flawless transition.
  1. Managed service: Post install, Metro Wireless now provides a full suite of ongoing managed services, including 24/7 network monitoring, proactive health checks, firmware and software updates, performance optimization, and detailed reporting.

    Our NOC (Network Operations Center) becomes an extension of Holland Hospital's IT team, ensuring the solution is always operating at peak performance.

Metro Wireless engineered a tailored MetroBONDX2 - one Starlink and one 5G bonding solution to act as the hospital's dedicated failover internet pathway.

The Result

Holland Hospital now operates with unparalleled network confidence. The hospital's IT team can be rest assured that their life-critical systems will remain online 24/7/365.

  1. Zero downtime: The automatic failover is instantaneous and unnoticeable to staff, preventing any disruption to patient care, surgery schedules, or administrative functions.
  1. Carrier diversity: By leveraging both satellite (Starlink) and cellular (5G) networks, the hospital is protected against outages specific to any single type of infrastructure.
  1. Enterprise-grade performance: The bonded connection provides more than enough bandwidth and low latency to fully support the hospital's operational needs during a primary outage.
  1. Hands-free operation: The managed service guarantee means the hospital's internal IT staff no longer needs to worry about monitoring, maintaining, or troubleshooting the failover system. Metro Wireless experts entirely handle it.

Our NOC (Network Operations Center) becomes an extension of Holland Hospital's IT team, ensuring the solution is always operating at peak performance.

Director of IT, Holland Hospital
“In healthcare, internet downtime isn’t an inconvenience— it’s a patient safety issue. The fully-managed MetroBONDX2 system gives us an incredibly resilient, ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ failover. The professional install was seamless, and knowing that Metro’s team is proactively monitoring our connection 24/7 provides a level of assurance that is invaluable. It allows my team to focus on supporting clinical staff, not managing internet connections.”‍

Client

Holland Hospital

Client industry

Healthcare

About the client

Holland Hospital is a leading regional medical center providing comprehensive healthcare services to its community.

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