Broadband : Office on the Go

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.

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.

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.

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
or Netbook? How to Decide What to Buy