Interconnecting 3 offices.

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francoistk

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Hi Everyone.

I hope one of the people who knows a bit more about some of the different broadband technologies would possibly be able to help me with this.

Currently we have one large office building and two "branch" offices, the one is basically a warehouse for hardware assembly and the second office is just for people because the current building is not big enough. The main building have a broadband internet connection, and we would like to connect the two other offices to the main building. The distance is not significant, the first office is less than 1km away and the warehouse is about 2km.

What I would like to know is what the most cost effective way would be to connect the two remote offices to the main office.

Kind Regards
Francois
 
Possibly have each office with an ADSL connection and create VPN tunnels connecting the networks.
I think that some ADSL routers can do this otherwise, you can get free Linux based firewalls that can also do it for you.
 
Legally, the above solution should work fine. Practically, broadband VPN's in SA is simply to slow for anything more than connecting to you central mail server. Documents take ages to open over VPN's, since ADSL only has 0.25Mbit upload speed (even on the 4MB one)

If you have Line of sight you could bridge the distance with Wi-fi Bridges. You should get 5MBit with good equipment. Too bad Telkom negotiated (read Dictated) with ICASA to make that illegal, but who's gonna tell ;)
 
Do you have a Windows 2003 server? If yes, i would set it up in terminal services mode. If no, then consider getting a dedicated PC per branch site at HQ... then use free software to remotely control those boxes from the branch sites over ADSL - no need to go above 512k adsl.

Free software? I would use the free dyndns updater with a free dyndns domain name (www.dyndns.org) to guarantee that your office boxes will always be visible from the outside, then use ultraVNC (www.uvnc.sf.net) with the encryption module to remotely control the boxes. Each box should use a different port (for UltraVNC) so that you can access both simultaneously - simply set up port forwarding in the router to point to the boxes, depending on the port.

Get 1 ADSL line per office and get one ADSL account that allows 4 or 5 concurrent connections - or if you don't need internet, get a local only account - much cheaper.
 
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