Reach for the STARS!

For our stores and distribution centres, Internet and Network connectivity is as essential as lighting and heating. In a cloud first world, without connectivity back to our key applications, our sites are left in the dark. No orders for the warehouses, our pallet trucks won’t move, there is no mobile point of sales, No Click and Collect orders and till sales are limited.

Not wanting to be left sat in the dark, Dunelm invests the time, money and resources into developing our connectivity strategy. In 2019 we took a leap of faith into the new world of SD-WAN. Whilst not without its initial teething issues, the work and effort placed into building out this platform has paved the way for everything that comes next. In 2021 we took the next step to onboard our distribution centres on to the SD-WAN platform.

Our Silverpeak (now Aruba) SD-WAN platform enables us to combine multiple connectivity technologies to create a more flexible network environment that puts the application at the centre of its routing decisions. As well as being able to communicate across the network it gives us the capability of sending traffic directly to our internet security platform or to break it out locally using the site’s own internet connection.

Despite being well into the 3rd decade of the 21st century, a surprising number of retail parks are not covered by Fibre To The Cab (FTTC) broadband we are used to at home. For those that are covered, this would be an easy win for low cost service with reasonably sufficient bandwidth. Easy that is if you are just looking at cost. For many of these services, speed is not guaranteed, SLAs for repairs are best endeavours and support is usually far from desirable. Instead, Dunelm chose to double down on its previous investments and have been rolling out full fibre Dedicated Internet Access circuits. Capable of speeds to meet our needs with headroom for whatever might be round the corner, all backed by 4 hour response from the provider.

By the mid-2023 all 189 Dunelm locations will be utilising these internet connections instead of traditional carrier owned private links or MPLS.

Stores connected — Job Done…Not quite!

Failures on these circuits are rare, but they do happen! Whether it’s hardware failure or someone running wild with a digger and ripping the fibre out the ground, there is still a chance the store is sent into darkness. To cover against this we took the decision to deploy 5G capable routers estate wide. These routers were loaded with two SIM cards that can roam onto any of the big 4 mobile networks. Robustel routers were selected both for their ability support the latest 5G and 4G standards and for their ability to survey the networks for the best throughput on regular intervals, two factors we considered important in an ever changing cellular environment.

To ensure we got the most out of this investment we worked closely with Netwrx, our support partner,to have every store surveyed for the best possible location for the 5G router to achieve best possible network coverage.

As we come to end of that deployment, we have realised that even with antennas stretching meters into the air, some locations were unable to reach the required speeds on?any?mobile network!

So what do we do…

…We reach for the Stars!

Just like when we were kids watching the space shuttle launches, the Networks Team at Dunelm have been watching in awe as SpaceX have been launching rocket after rocket into the air to create a mesh of satellites into low earth orbit (340 Miles). Each satellite is about the size of a small car and weighs about 265 kg. The satellites are equipped with several high-gain phased array antennas that allow them to communicate with other satellites in the network and with ground stations. This is all something, that as kids, we would have only believed to be true in movies.

By being so much closer to the earth than traditional internet satellites, combined with its custom designed phased array terminals, Starlink offer greater speeds and much lower latency.

We then connected the Starlink router to our SD-WAN appliance, and its done! Instantly, the appliance uses the internet to identify our core appliances, creates tunnels to it, and starts processing traffic. Its was so seamless it was almost anti-climatic.

Having now completed the proof of concept installation to our head office we are now working with our property teams to get the antennas installed on the roof at least 10 of our stores.