Case Study: Engineered Flexible Products, St. Michael, Minnesota

“We're very satisfied with our service and highly recommend Nextera. We've had much greater reliability than with our previous provider -- and significant cost savings.”

Dan Larson | Vice President of Purchasing | Engineered Flexible Products

Meeting Customer Needs Across the Country

Engineered Flexible Products conducts business throughout the United States and requires reliable, cost-effective phone and data services to keep them connected to the company's primary computer, which is offsite in Chicago, Illinois. With the Minnesota office located a little over 30 miles northwest of the Twin Cities in the town of St. Michael, they need consistently reliable phone and data services around-the-clock for 14 work stations and a warehouse inventory system.

Nextera fixed wireless serves city, semi-rural and rural areas

Problem: Getting Consistently Reliable Voice and Data Services in a Semi-Rural Area

"We're in a semi-rural area here -- there's a farm a half-mile down the road and a golf course nearby," said Dan Larson, Vice-President of Purchasing. "We had problems sustaining reliable connections with our previous provider and it was getting worse, so at that point we began looking at options. To get hooked up to fiber would have cost 25K."

Fiber accessibility is generally much greater in metropolitan areas. For companies located outside of highly populated cities, the cost can be prohibitive for small and mid-size companies.

The Solution: Fixed Wireless

"I have an electronics background and was familiar with fixed wireless technology, so the redundancy that fixed wireless provides is initially what appealed to me," said Dan.

When Dan met with one of Nextera's fixed wireless specialists, the first question he had was: "How is this going to work when it snows?" Unlike other Internet service delivery methods, Nextera isn't dependent on wires that run underground and are vulnerable to construction, certain weather conditions and other circumstances that may cause service to be accidentally cut off. Instead, fixed wireless delivers bandwidth through the air from a fixed wireless tower with an unobstructed line-of-sight. It offers a private, dedicated network that provides high security levels."

"The installation of our fixed wireless service was virtually seamless. It was on time and performed the way Nextera promised it would," said Dan. "The day after the installation we had some severe weather with a significant downpour of rain. And our data never faltered. I knew then we'd made a great decision choosing Nextera as our provider."

Since fixed wireless bypasses traditional Internet infrastructure, there aren't multiple layers of service to troubleshoot if a connectivity problem arises. Nextera owns the largest fixed wireless network in the state of Minnesota, working directly with every customer. The streamlined nature of fixed wireless allows our technical specialists to diagnose and resolve problems quickly -- and a team of specialists are on call 24 hours every day to solve issues that may occur.

"We're very satisfied with our service and highly recommend Nextera. We've had much greater reliability than with our previous provider -- and significant cost savings. As a very conservative estimate, I'd say we saved 30% off the top. We couldn't be happier."