Re: Connectivity

Just a couple of points to ponder ...

Using the internet and IP is the flavor of the day, but jokes like WWW means
"World Wide Wait" did not come out of thin air.
As usual, it depends.

I don't know where you are at, but up here in the Puget Sound area of the 
Pacific
Northwest,  U.S.Worst will set you up a 56k frame relay, only to guarantee 28.8 
@
$1,000 at each end install and about $60/month.  They will also tell you that 
you
can NOT do voice over frame relay while you are talking to them over a frame
relay! ;-)

Since you are talking about a remote office being 7 miles away, I'd like to 
share
with you about how we solved a similar situation:
The host site gets an ISDN/T1/T4 (whatever is needed for traffic) connection to 
a
local ISP ... with static IP address  ($125 install/$85/mo for 250 hours for 
ISDN
@ 128k  ... BTW 5 days * 4.33 weeks @ 9 hours per day = just shy of 195 hours )
... and the remote site gets a $19.95/mo @ 56k dialup with a product like
"Wingate" to act as a proxy server for their network or if more throughput is
required they get their own ISDN router (with static IP address so you can 
filter
Telnet) and hum right along.

BTW, the local U.S.Worst has an  "Office On-line" offering for about $85/mo for
any business with less than 20 phone lines to obtain a 2 channel (64k each) ISDN
and single POTS line.  The POTS line can replace any voice/fax line you may
already have in place.  Which around here costs about $35/mo (taxes and all) for
a commercial line just to get a dial tone.  So if you can replace a $35 POTS 
line
used for fax, your cost for 128k ISDN is $50/mo.

Your branch office, with less than 20 phone lines, may be able to obtain a 128k
ISDN connection for about $85/mo with the local telco plus another $85/mo for 
the
local ISP to connect to your AS/400 @ 250 hrs/mo.  Even a dumb program can, at
most, send 1920 characters to replace an entire screen.  That's 1920 bytes @ 8
bits = 15,360 bps or 15 of 128k per second.  So you have to ask yourself, are
more than 8.53 people hitting ENTER or someother full screen replacement per
second?

Now, this is not the only solution.  The best solution will depend upon the 
local
cost of available options and your need for up time.  Around here we skipped 
over
frame because the cost was the same as ISDN/mo and the guaranteed throughput was
only 25% for frame vs ISDN.  ISDN gave use a workable 9.6k POTS fax line in the
package and as I mentioned before an single commercial line around here costs
about $35/mo.

Having said all that, now lets talk about digital PCS.  Out here in the boonies
we may get the latest about 2 years late, but the latest scuttlebutt around here
is that as long as you are within spitting distance of a tower, you can have a
two way communications with your ball-n-chain/400 and get paged QSYSOPR message
AND enter a response! Not to mention digital remote office access.

I love this country! Only in America.  ;-}

Now unless you cross a city/county boundary you may want to check out a 
dedicated
line for SNA traffic.  The 7 miles may mean 30 miles of station-to-station
connection at $x/mile to the local telco per month and be cost prohibitive with
the added cost of remote WS controllers.  Now if the 7 miles does NOT cross any
tariff boundary, you may be better off with a dedicated leased line.

As with most solutions, it depends.

James W. Kilgore
email@James-W-Kilgore.com

P.S. If you need a 25 word or less solution, with what info provided, I need a
week.  If you need a 250 word solution, I'm ready right now ;-)


>
> >
> > We need to move about 45 people to some leased office space by 3/31/99.
> > They will need connectivity to our existing Novell LAN/WAN and AS/400
> > RISC machine (not to mention existing voice telecomm equip.!).  We
> > currently have 2 Novell remotes connected over frame-relay coming into
> > Novell NetWare SAA gateways to access AS/400.  This leased office space
> > is about 7 miles from corporate.  What are our options?  We'd like to
> > keep it as simple as possible due to time constraint.  Also, since our
> > Customer Service department will be one of the groups moving, reliable
> > access is key.  Reviewing dedicated voice/data T-1s, voice over data for
> > T-1/frame, etc.
> >
> > Any and all ideas welcome!
> >
>

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