Holland Hospital is a leading regional medical center providing comprehensive healthcare services to its community. Its life-critical operations, including Electronic Health Records (EHR), medical imaging, telehealth services and critical communications, depend entirely on uninterrupted, high-speed internet. The hospital's primary connection is an enterprise-grade fiber line, and its internal IT team, led by the Director of Infrastructure & Support, is responsible for keeping those systems online around the clock.

Holland Hospital's primary internet connection, a reliable enterprise-grade fiber line, was a single point of failure. Fiber networks can suffer rare but disruptive outages from construction accidents, equipment failure or local node issues, and in a hospital any loss of connectivity puts EHR access, imaging, telehealth and critical communications at risk. IT leadership wanted a robust, automatic failover.

The requirements were specific. Failover had to be immediate and automatic, taking over during any primary outage with zero downtime. The solution needed certified, professional installation and ongoing management so it integrated with existing network infrastructure, complied with hospital IT security policies and freed up the internal IT team. Three static IPs were required for hosting internal servers, secure remote access and consistent VPN connections for staff. And it had to perform reliably in an urban environment with potential signal obstructions and network congestion.

Traditional wireline failover such as coax or DSL was ruled out: its slow speeds and high latency would cripple modern medical applications.

Metro Wireless engineered a tailored MetroBONDX2 bonding solution to act as the hospital's dedicated failover internet pathway. The setup combines one Starlink satellite dish with one high-performance 5G modem from a separate cellular carrier. This dual-WAN approach provides redundancy within the redundancy: if one wireless connection fails, the other maintains the connection via SD-WAN.

At the heart of the system is the MetroBONDX2 SD-WAN appliance, a Peplink unit that continuously monitors the performance of the primary fiber line and both wireless connections. The moment the fiber link fails, the appliance instantly routes all traffic through the bonded Starlink + 5G connection without dropping a single data packet, so the switch is invisible to staff.

A certified Metro Wireless technician conducted an on-site survey to find the optimal mounting positions for the 5G antenna and Starlink dish, 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 end to end.

Post-install, Metro Wireless provides a full managed service: 24/7 network monitoring, proactive health checks, firmware and software updates, performance optimisation and detailed reporting. Its Network Operations Center acts as an extension of Holland Hospital's IT team, keeping the failover solution at peak performance without adding to the internal team's workload.

• Zero downtime: automatic failover is instantaneous and unnoticeable to staff, protecting patient care, surgery schedules and administration
• Carrier diversity across satellite (Starlink) and cellular (5G) shields the hospital from outages on any single infrastructure type
• Bonded connection provides ample bandwidth and low latency to support hospital operations during a primary fiber outage
• Three static IPs configured on the bonded link for internal servers, remote access and staff VPNs
• Hands-free operation: Metro Wireless's NOC monitors, maintains and troubleshoots the failover system 24/7