ISP Baltic Broadband Introduce Baltic Backpack to Fix Connectivity

Business ISP Baltic Broadband, which typically offers a mix of fixed wireless and full fibre broadband to firms in the Liverpool area, has introduced an unusual new product called the ‘Baltic Backpack‘ – designed to be introduced to tackle areas of slow or failed broadband, seemingly by harnessing multiple cellular networks.

According to the announcement, the provider was recently able to deploy their new product to Liverpool’s hospitality sector, where it is said to have saved “dozens of bars” tens of thousands of pounds this year (this is linked to how they are now entirely broadband dependent for taking payments, orders and managing reservations). But sadly, no practical case studies are included to help elaborate on this.

The Baltic Backpack itself, which looks pretty bulky, is said to have been designed and developed in-house “over months of trial and error” by the provider’s own engineers. The aim was for the portable unit to act as a full service broadband connection, getting hospitality teams back online quickly and bringing service back to full capacity.

Matt Wilson, Baltic Broadband Founder, said:

“Lots of people in the sector were calling us after weekends when their broadband went down, saying it affected their tills, kitchen orders and security cameras and had cost them a fortune in lost business to ask how we could help. And when they’re tied into contracts for years, with support from their provider arriving 3 working days later, it was clear there needed to be a solution.”

The announcement is somewhat shy on the detail of how this solution works, although they do talk about harnessing the “potential of their own network with the capabilities of multiple cellular networks to create a highly available and resilient solution.” One customer told the team that it had saved them over £15,000 in a single weekend.

Apparently, this is more than just a fancy mobile broadband dongle: “Sticking a SIM card into a bar and hoping the signal is strong enough to make everything work wasn’t what people wanted,” said the ISP, partly because “all it takes is a busy night with loads of users on a network and you’re back to square one“. But this is debatable, depending upon the detail of each case and actual network demand vs local mobile capacity, signal etc.

At this point we asked Baltic for some more details, since there’s nothing on their website or any indication of system cost or rental charges. The announcement makes it sound like some sort of connection bonding system, which can aggregate data connections from different mobile operators, as well as Baltic’s own wireless broadband network (if available). Such solutions are tricky to get right and often have caveats.

The ISP informed us that the Backpack has multiple (up to 12) SIM cards, which connect to different mobile operators that they peer with at various internet exchanges (keeping latency low). The provider collects the traffic from the mobile operators at the radio access network handoff point (RAN) so that they can provide their internet service “over the top“, while avoiding the typical Carrier Grade NAT issues and being able to provide static IP addressing (as well as various other layer 2 services).

“It is very different from a traditional 4G/5G service as we send a copy of all data across all 12 SIM connections, using the first data packet to arrive, creating a highly available and resilient connection,” said the provider to ISPreview. This sounds a bit like some of the other aggregation services that we’ve seen before, where some degree of remote VPN / cloud processing is required to merge different connections into one.

The provider said the Baltic Backpack wasn’t on their website “yet“, but that customers could rent it at a cost of £150 per day – hefty, but this is only intended to be a temporary mobile “on location” hire or emergency internet service. As such, a business might only need it for a day or so, before their main link is back. However, smaller businesses could probably cope with just a regular 4G or 5G backup / failover, provided there’s a signal.

Crucially, everything is included in that price and the data allowances are unlimited, so no need for the customer to buy lots of mobile SIMs to feed it. “The SIM cards are unlimited business SIM’s by way of a special agreement with each mobile operator, which results in lower latency, less slow-down’s and various other traffic management/shaping that happens on regular mobile SIM solutions,” added the operator.