OPINION: Although a lot of the work I do at the Lab requires me to be in the Lab (a 40ppm laser printer, for example, is not an item you can carry around in your back pocket and test at your convenience), I've found I need to maintain a home office.
It's a fact of life now that 9am to 5pm work hours have gone the way of the dinosaur and while it's not mandatory you have a home office, if you don't, your home, loved ones and friends will become rarely visited memories.
The only problem now is determining how to set up that home office so it actually lets you get some quality work done.
Having your own PC, printer, etc, is a given, but one of the things I've found to be invaluable is my cable connection to the outside world (others in the Lab have opted for ADSL to the home in areas where cable is not available).
My old modem would hum along during a download at roughly 4KB per second but my cable peaks at 400Kb per second. Even on a very bad day I still achieve speeds of over 100Kb per second. As a consequence, I am able to log onto my work server each time I fire up my home PC and enjoy exactly the same drive mappings as my work PC.
Now we have a new addition who is going through the set up process. The Lab has just employed its first Business Development Manager--until Michael arrived we were just a collection of techies and, as a consequence, were not the best at identifying potential clients and selling our services.
Now we would like him to enjoy the same freedom to work from home, but would he face the same barrier of no broadband service that so many colleagues seem to be up against?
At first glance, it would seem he is one of the lucky ones: Michael is in a new housing complex that features optic fibre to the street and then copper to each house. Unfortunately, he has discovered that his modem peaks at a dismal 1Kb per second and Telstra has been unable to remedy the problem. And, because the phone lines are not copper all the way back to the exchange, ADSL is a no go (though you could throw a rock over the fence into the next suburb where cable services are available, there are no plans to extend the service into Michael's suburb).
So what options remain? Without going right over the top the only options remaining appear to be ISDN or satellite and even these two options are far from cheap.
Onramp Home includes telephone and 64Kbps data. If you convert an existing line it's around AU$190 to install together with a monthly fee of AU$37.40. This, however, simply provides you with a faster connection to your ISP, so you still need an ISP contract, which means it's really going to cost around AU$60 to AU$70 a month. Oh, and don't forget to add the AU$0.30 to AU$1.10 per hour that is charged for data access calls.
The satellite solution involves a decision: going for relatively inexpensive one-way service or the considerably more costly two-way. The one-way satellite option relies on a modem for data upload. If you're mainly downloading data this does not present a problem.
The cost for one-way satellite is around AU$77 per month with a 3GB download limit at 400Kbps and a one-off hardware purchase for the dish and card of AU$330. For the one-way option, installation and aiming of the dish is not as critical as two-way so Michael should be able to cope with the actual installation himself.
Let's take a look at the champagne option, two-way satellite: you can start with the basic 64Kbps both ways at AU$120 per month for just 300MB. But to get a service approaching the one-way option you are looking at 512Kbps download and 128Kbps upload with a 3GB cap at a heady AU$450 per month. Then, of course, one-off hardware and installation costs to a typical suburban site are AU$699 and AU$399, respectively.
In Michael's case the one-way satellite seems the best performance/cost compromise.
Steve Turvey is Lab Manager of the RMIT IT Test Labs, and can be reached at stevet@ rmit.edu.au.
I looked at ORHH for myself and there are no data charges that I'm aware of, and the line(s if you use both channels for data) cost 18c to make the call, no timed fees. I looked at our current setup (56K modems on a windows RAS server) and came up with the following ideas:
One, we have our server pool online 24/7, and we have a firewall which talks IPSEC.
Two, we have ISDN lines available at work.
Three, dialling into our existing modems can only ever attain 33.6Kbps async as 56K needs digital modems and a digital line in.
Using a pair of ISDN indial numbers and a simple old ISDN router like an Ascend Pipeline 50 / Cisco whatever and getting ORHH installed ups the speed to 64K synchronous, which is almost twice the CIR that a 56K async connection can do, and probably three or four times the 33.6K we are currently getting.
Alternatively I've looked at getting some individual DSP modems and putting them on an ISDN tail to at least get 56K connections, but for the moment ISDN looks the best bet. If I or another manager need to call in from an ORHH connection we can use one channel for data and retain the home phone, and when the speed needs upping, disconnect and reconnect both channels in multilink configuration for 128K sync speeds - sweet... ORHH makes a few 18c calls, the work ISDN doesn't make any dialout calls, should be cheap enough.
I haven't checked prices for ISDN routers/interfaces yet but ORHH is supplied with an ISDN modem, and another box for the server connection shouldn't cost too much either. But we actually have a few Cisco and Ascend boxes we can press into service, too. YMMV.
I've avoided ADSL because it's an "IP-less" modem they provide (PPPoE or something similarly perverse,) which makes routing hard. If you don't mind IP tunnelling, you could also connect via ORHH to many ISPs these days and use IPSEC back to the company firewall or a secondary firewall set up expressly for IPSEC tunnels - that's the other thing I was looking at, keeping my ISP (where I have 24/7) and tunnelling... Again, YMMV especially if your manager type has no ISP or the ISP doesn't support ISDN.