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Internet Connection For Solar Team Twente In The Australian Outback

First published by Poynting.tech

In 2019 Frontier Computer Corp. B.V. was a proud partner of Solar Team Twente. Solar Team Twente consists of more than 20 Engineers who get together to build the most innovative, high-tech solar car with which they intend to inspire the world. Frontier BV is a Poynting partner in the Netherlands that offer Peplink routers, Poynting antennas and Mondicon data bundles with excellent technical support.

Every car that Solar Team Twente designed in the past must contribute to the future of a sustainable world and to reach the UN Global Goals. Just like previous editions, the latest car (called RED E) is an innovative feat. RED E is a lot smaller than the previous cars, because they switched to GaAs solar cells, instead of silicon cells, that was used in the past.

RED E participated in the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge in October 2019. For over 30 years, the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge has welcomed the greatest minds from around the world to Australia to push the limits of technological innovation and travel the outback in a vehicle powered only by the energy of the sun. Traversing 3,000km from Darwin to Adelaide, teams comprise of tertiary and secondary students from over 30 countries.

During this race through the Australian outback the RED E and Solar Team Twente needed to have a reliable internet connection in multiple cars of their convoy, both to communicate with each other and to retrieve weather data to determine the best strategy. An LTE connection was used when available, satellite was the fallback in case the LTE connection was unavailable. They needed a router that could provide a reliable and seamless backup and Frontier offered Poynting and Peplink as the answer.

They provided two Peplink MAX HD2 LTEA Cellular routers with four Poynting Antennas OMNI-402 antennas to be installed in the cars and one Balance 310 that was installed in Twente to setup an unbreakable VPN with SpeedFusion technology. The feedback from Solar Team Twente was that the setup worked perfectly!