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Broadband : Office on the Go

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

While on the move, one thing you would like is a VPN connection to your

office so that you can keep accessing your corporate mail server, internal

business app services such as ERP, CRM, etc, your files and printers etc. This

always sounds fascinating and also helps you add to your productivity. But, is

it possible today and if yes then what all is required for this? Yes!More or

less, this is possible in India today. You will require two things for this,

mobile high speed Internet connection, WAN optimization on the go and some good

VPN solutions.

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It is most likely that you already have a VPN solution for regular usages, on

place, which is essentially branch office to head office, or home to office kind

of a connection where a high speed wire line connection is pretty much possible.

Let's concentrate on how you can push it and make it available to the road

warriers who want to access this VPN from a coffee shop, from a client's office,

or even from an airport.

Mobile Broadband



While talking about mobile broadband four names strike our minds -BSNL/MTNL,

Reliance and Tata Indicom. All of them either have 3G based products which can

give you up to a speed of few Mbs per second, which is more or less okay for

connecting to a VPN. Not only this, it gives you a good Internet connection

experience as well. That means, mails can be accessed faster, attachments can be

downloaded quickly, video chats are less choppier, video streaming comes without

buffering breaks, etc. But since 3G is still in its nascent stage in India, it

does come at a hefty premium. For more details on the pricing of the data cards

and the available plans see the table.

Recommended plans for 3G Data Cards
BSNL 3G Plan 650- Rs 650 (includes 1 GB data download free;

Rs 2 per MB extra usage beyond 1 GB)



Unlimited- Rs 3,000 (Unlimited usage)
MTNL Jadoo 3G Plan- Rs 599 (No free usage; Rs 5 per MB normal

usage; 200 minutes of 12 channels on Mobile TV free)
Reliance Netconnect Broadband Broadband 1 GB Plan- Rs 650 (1 GB data download free;

Rs 2 per MB extra usage)



Broadband 10 GB Plan- Rs 1,750 (10GB data download free; Rs 2 per MB
extra usage)
TATA Indicom PHOTON+ Photon+1- Rs 650 (1 GB data download free; Rs 2 per

MB extra usage)



Freedom Plan- Rs 1250 (10 GB data download free; Rs 2 per MB extra
usage)
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Whatever said and done, 3G is the new buzzword in the country. 3G, or third

generation networks offer high speeds for downloading and uploading. Technically

we can achieve upto around 15Mbps with 3G but now the maximum possible

connection available in our country is around 3Mbps which is even pretty decent.

Also, 3G is not available everywhere in the country just yet. Coverage is

currently limited to few cities.

Using a WAN accelerator you can actually achieve 75 to 300%

of data optimization.

We have tried CDMA based high speed connections from both Reliance and Tata

Indicom and both of them gave great performance. We got a speed between 1.5 to 3

Mbps which is actually decent. But this kind of speed is not enough sometimes,

when you are talking about a seamless VPN connection. If we really need to feel

the same as we are sitting at office and accessing our network which is mostly

100Mbps or more, we need to do something else even to enhance the experience and

that's where the need for bandwidth optimization comes into picture.

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Mobile Bandwidth Optimization



Mobile bandwidth optimization or WAN acceleration is a pretty new concept.

If you look a couple of years back, there were good WAN accelerators available

but were only meant for branch offices and were heavily expensive and bulky. So

nobody could have thought of making them compact for carry around purposes. But

due to the global revolution in the mobile Internet space this need actually

came up and now we have software based WAN accelerator clients which can work

the same as those huge boxes fixed at the branch office level for providing

faster experience over the WAN. These are now personal and run from a laptop.

We have seen in the last couple of years, and implemented and reviewed quite

a few such products. This included Steelhead Mobile 2.0 from RiverBed and

Replify from Raptor. Steelhead Mobile 2.0 is a hardware at the data center level

and software at the client's level while Replify from Raptor is a software

application. Even the software at the data center side is a virtual appliance.

You can read more about them at: http://tinyurl.com/mcw6ya and 2.

http://tinyurl.com/nndzgm

Next :

Notebook

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