Where's the voice in remote access?

Make telecommuting a cinch with service advances to workers' homes.

Study after study shows that telecommuting is a win-win proposition for both employers and employees. While the benefits are well-documented, organizations are still challenged in providing the right environment for telecommuting. Most of the infrastructure and policies in place for telecommuting deal with dial-up data connectivity to the corporate local area network (LAN).

While employees spend most of their time in front of a computer, the 20% of their time that they spend on the phone is usually the most crucial. Providing good telephone or voice access for telecommuters is as important as providing data connectivity. Ideally, telecommuters should have a virtual connection into both their corporate data and voice networks.

Residential DSL services combined with virtual private networks (VPNs) have the potential to make the telecommuter a part of the company's voice and data network.

Residential DSL services are being widely deployed, and homes are being offered up to 1.5 Mbps connections to the Internet. In fact, full rate ADSL can go as high as 8 Mbps downstream and 700 kbps upstream. At the same time, employers are increasingly implementing VPNs to enable remote workers to connect to the enterprise intranet. By combining DSL services and VPNs, employers now have a way to provide a high-bandwidth and secure connection to corporate resources. More importantly, this fast and secure connection need not be limited to data applications only. In fact, the real payoff for organizations may be the remote voice access that a DSL-enabled VPN connection provides.

Until now, the local loop, also known as the "last mile," has been the bottleneck to high-speed network access from the home.

With ADSL service providing the bandwidth to run voice and data over a single phone line, organizations can now extend the notion of running voice and other circuit-switched services as IPpackets, also known as IP telephony, to their telecommuters. The complementary trend within enterprises toward VPNs for remote access provides the infrastructure and policies to make that virtual voice and data connection both secure and reliable.

VPNs are based on "tunneling," which creates a secure connection between two network points. This connection is based on TCP/IP, and can be used over the Internet. To create a VPN tunnel, a remote end user merely connects to his ISP's local point of presence and launches a VPN client that seeks the server on the enterprise network.

Once the user is authenticated, the information flow between the server and the client is encrypted for security. Enterprises can also contract service providers, like Internet exchange carriers (IXCs), local exchange carriers (LECs), and ISPs, to manage VPN services. Doing so provides enterprises with a guaranteed level of service on the VPN connection.

The net result: the combination of DSL and VPN service can provide telecommuters with a secure high-speed connection to their corporate voice and data resources. With applications based on IP telephony, telecommuters will be able to take advantage of the voice applications, as well.

Nearly all major PBX vendors have started offering IP-based platforms or IP extensions to existing platforms. IP telephony gives the PBX and the applications running on it an IP interface. All the traditional PBX features, such as four-digit dialing, conferencing, auto-attendant and voice mail, can now be accessed over an IP connection. A telecommuter sitting at home, for all practical purposes, can appear just like a worker at his desk.

IP telephony adds other enhanced services, such as unified messaging, where voice, fax and e-mails are unified into a single message system.

Today, multiservice residential gateways provide a broadband solution that combines the management of voice and data access over a single broadband connection. Designed specifically for managing DSL-based converged services in residential settings, the residential gateway combines broadband WAN access with embedded intelligence to set up VPN connections to corporate IP telephony and data applications.

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Khatri is product manager for 2 Wire Inc., San Jose, CA.