Frank, unfortunately I do not have the technical background to grasp more than a fraction of your excellent post. Notwithstanding, and rushing in where angels fear. . .
I think what you said is EXACTLY what our little company is facing with our current installation. We are using Concentric/Covad to set up a VPN so that our remote offices can access our server over the net rather than incur long distance telephone charges which would be the case had we gone the more traditional RAS via modem route. There are other advantages to the VPN approach, of course, such as not having to stick lots of modems on your server: IP addresses are handy little critters and facilitate simultaneous sessions a bit more elegantly, at least as I understand it.
Well, the hooker, as you pointed out, is the "cloud". We can get our remote users "on" to the net via DSL lickety-split[technical term]. Ditto: we can get the data "off" the net via DSL at the server end pronto as well. But, as all you guys who know this stuff about a zillion times better than I do, the glitch is that the transmission bogs down to the lowest common denominator. Ergo, if the cloud is running at slow speeds, quick on ramps and off ramps don't seem to make a heck of a lot of difference. Since our application is not mission critical, or whatever the right term is, we simply adapt by having our remote users log on an hour later or whatever. To me, this is like being aware of freeway traffic patterns: nobody in Silicon Valley would drive 237 between 7AM and 9AM unless they had a gun to their head [or a job, which may be equivalent]. And, in fact, this is exactly what our remote users are doing: they have become aware of when the net, in their neck of the woods, is jammed up [after lunch when everybody gets back to their desk and checks e-mail seems to be a particularly lousy time, for example], but, at other times, screen response times are great and everything is "snappy". What I can't determine is if the DSL 'on and off ramps' are really making any difference or just give me psychologicl comfort that the users won't revolt. The 'always on' feature has become such a big hit however, that there is no chance that we could remove DSL at this point so the debate is highly academic at this juncture.
Does this make any sense to people who actually understand this stuff?
Regards, Mike Doyle |
