Two hangars, one public road, and a circuit bill that never ended
A 5.7GHz point-to-point microwave link joining two Emirates maintenance facilities at 100 Mbps with AES-256 encryption, replacing recurring MPLS circuit costs.
The challenge
Two Emirates maintenance facilities in Warsan, Dubai sit either side of a public road. Fibre between them would have meant civil works and road permissions from the RTA, which were not feasible, so the sites ran on leased MPLS circuits with a recurring bill and no ownership of the link. The requirement was mission-critical: at least 30 Mbps of low-latency connectivity, 99.99% availability, end-to-end encryption, and integration into the corporate network. Emirates approved a single downtime window of three to four hours for the cutover, and that window could not slip. The alternative of doing nothing was not free either: every month on leased circuits was money spent on connectivity the airline would never own, for a link between two of its own buildings.
What we built
A multidisciplinary task force of more than twelve civil, network, wireless and integration engineers designed the solution and ran a two-week proof of concept before touching production. The build was a 5.7 GHz point-to-point microwave link: three-metre rooftop poles on both buildings, structured cabling from the poles to the network nodes, industrial-grade PoE switches at each end, and AES-256 encryption over a secure tunnel into the corporate network with routing configured to match. Because the design and the proof of concept had already settled every question, the production cutover was completed in under three hours, inside the approved window.
What remains
The link runs as core infrastructure at 100 Mbps, more than three times the required throughput, at MPLS-grade availability and with no recurring circuit fees. There were no civil works and no road cutting. What remains is a pattern Emirates has since extended to other locations: encrypted wireless links the airline owns outright, that can be relocated as the estate changes rather than re-leased. The two-week proof of concept did most of the work: by the time the cutover window opened, the only unknown left was the weather.
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