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Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications (ASND) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Phoenix who wrote (47349)	5/21/1998 8:47:00 PM
From: djane	Respond to of 61433

LANTimes. REMOTE ACCESS. 56K is no simple upgrade wcmh.com./lantimes/98/98may/805b048a.html By Brett Mendel Elektra Entertainment's dial-in users are clamoring for more bandwidth. Sales representatives at the company, which is one of three record labels under the Warner Brothers Studios umbrella, have to keep constant tabs on the fickle listening andbuying trends of music fans. Elektra's remote employees and traveling sales people constantly download reports on record sales and air play around the country. So last year, the company's IT staff was quick to hand out the newest, fastest PC Card modems to most of their 125 remote users. However, they still can not realize the full 56Kbps speeds the modems promise. Why have connections been throttled back to the old 33.6Kbps transfer rate? The usual suspects--service providers supporting a flavor of 56Kbps technology different from Elektra's, and poor line quality--can not be blamed for the lackluster performance. Instead, the culprit can be found at the server at Elektra's LAN. As other network managers are realizing, if they are to support 56Kbps on remote-access servers, they need a digital connection leading in to the LAN. Elektra had been aware of this requirement, but outfitting its Shiva Corp. LanRover with a digital pipe has nevertheless become a lengthy project of requisitioning and installing a T-1 line. "We have to adjust the infrastructure on the back end. If it was as simple as upgrading cards in the server, we would have done it by now," says John Weaver, director of IT at Elektra in New York. But the need for an incoming digital line isn't the only adjustment network administrators may face when they upgrade existing analog dial-in servers to 56Kbps. Managing and troubleshooting modems attached to digital lines becomes more complicated. In addition, because the servers may be handling 33.6Kbps or slower analog, 56Kbps, and possibly ISDN connections, new methods may be necessary for managing the complex mix of technologies that terminate in one device. For users to receive their data at 56Kbps, the server they dial in to must have a digital line. Only transmissions that originate at 56Kbps can maintain near 56K speeds when converted to analog between the public network's nearest CO (central office) and the user's PC. Upstream transmissions sent as analog for the initial haul from the remote user to the CO are converted to digital signals at the CO and can only reach 33.6Kbps. This necessitates either BRI (Basic Rate Interface), PRI (Primary Rate Interface), or T-1 connections between corporate sites and the public network to properly support 56Kbps on the server side, a fact that may be easy to overlook. "Network managers will be in for a rude awakening if they think their analog servers are going to handle 56K," says Brad Baldwin, director of remote access at International Data Corp., a market-research company in Mountain View, Calif. "But a lot of people haven't been advised that their equipment is 100 percent incompatible with 56K technologies." For Elektra, putting in a T-1 line has created a lengthy upgrade process. Instead of a simple software upgrade from V.34-compatible modems to those based on Rockwell Semiconductor Systems/Lucent Technologies Inc. K56flex, 3Com x2, or the new V.90 standard for 56Kbps, Elektra's Weaver reports that the project has grown to include budgeting the T-1 connection and replacing modems in the remote-access server. Opening up the network to faster access may also affect performance on the local network. "The potential bottleneck becomes the remote-access server and the network," he says. "You have to make sure you have sufficient bandwidth to handle the traffic and access to databases." In addition, network managers report troubleshooting digital lines is exponentially more difficult than troubleshooting analog lines. "In the days with just analog modems, you could plug a phone into the line to check it for problems," says Dale Smith, assistant director of network services at the University of Oregon in Eugene, which operates a bank of 192 x2-based modems and 150 analog modems. "Diagnosis is a lot harder with 56Kbps because you can't touch the digital lines," he says. The way calls are distributed from digital circuits to remote-access servers is different from the simple hunt se-quences common with analog servers and even varies among carriers, he adds. As a result, managing the eight incoming T-1 lines for the university's 56Kbps servers requires using both the servers' sophisticated software and working closely with those who control the switch at the local CO. Network administrators may also need to reconsider the tools required to manage the different technologies coming in to the server. Managing ports and usage for both analog and digital connections may be possible only if the servers for each come from the same manufacturer. Even though the long-awaited standard for 56Kbps has been approved, upgrading remote-access servers may still be a more complicated and involved process than had originally been thought.