SOHO to the Enterprise: End-to-End or Dead End? By Christopher Smith and Ron Bunal   Seems like every remote-access vendor hawks its product line as a "total solution" that integrates small offices into the central office environment. What, we wondered, constitutes a "total solution?" More to the point, with telecommuting on the rise and the bandwidth requirements of remote users increasing, how do vendors support remote ISDN to the enterprise? To find some answers, we brought five products--Ascend Communications' Pipeline 75, Bay Networks' Nautica CLAM, Shiva Corp.'s AccessPort, 3Com Corp.'s OfficeConnect Remote 530 and U.S. Robotics' LANLinker BRI--into our Syracuse University lab to examine how well they enhance the integration of small off ice/home office (SOHO) ISDN Basic Rate Interface (BRI) routers into the central office. To view the Report card. Our decision to test only ISDN BRI routers centered on ISDN's ability to support the small office with additional bandwidth for remote LAN-to-LAN routing. In addition, these devices offer small offices support for standard plain old telephone system (POTS) for traditional analog voice and fax, as well as concurrently supporting native packet switching for data transfer; they operate over two 64-Kbps channels. By providing both voice and data at an affordable price (usually less than $100 per month), the devices make it feasible for the small-office environment to benefit from both kinds of service for just slightly more than the cost of a standard analog line. They also go beyond simply routing packet data over the ISDN network, affording intelligent tariff management to keep connection rates down for users charged on a per-call or per-minute basis. Tariff management is absolutely necessary to preserve the cost-effectiveness of the devices; all of the devices we tested offer packet-filtering. To manage filtering, it is important to be able to reuse the same configuration, and all of the devices we tested were able to move configurations to other devices. The central-office servers against which we tested these devices were large-scale digital modem servers that could deliver both analog and digital sources and support two to four incoming Primary Rate Interface (PRI) connections along with 48 to 96 analog connections. The ability to support connections from either ISDN routers that could request multiple "B" channels or from analog modems makes these central-site solutions flexible to caller needs without extensive configuration to differentiate between both types of incoming calls. Our goal was to identify those features that go beyond the capabilities of a small-office router to illustrate how teaming a SOHO router with a high-density remote-access server from the same product line could help manage an end-to-end connection. Although our test results couldn't justify all the marketing hype, we did uncover features that might persuade you to buy into a single product line, such as global security management applications, ease in configuring remote devices and central-office routers that can intelligently route back to the small office. Although easy installation and management are traditional hallmarks of most SOHO dial-up solutions, this wasn't the case in the SOHO ISDN router arena. This is because integrating ISDN into LAN-to-LAN routing makes it more difficult to set up and maintain the entire connection. All too often, the remote-access specialist at the central office must manage scores of small sites where there is no one with the necessary technical expertise to deploy and manage these devices. If these devices don't allow the central-office specialist to perform management tasks, these devices will become worthless. Major end-to-end features we looked for in these small devices included enterprise management capabilities, individual router options and additional support from other products in the product line and ease of SOHO management at the small-office site. To download an Adobe Acrobat .pdf format version of the SOHO ISDN Remote-Access Device Features charts, click here.

Video C alls Within Walls (and Outside Too) by Dave Brown Updated May 23, 1997