We are looking at expanding our office to a new location. We need to add about 6 terminals to our system. We are considering the best alternatives. We have two possible routes to consider. We use dumb terminals for our POS and inventory, accounting etc. THe bandwidth requirements for these are extreemley low...19,200 kbps. We have a LAN in place already, running 10 Base T. Most of the services on the LAN are internet dependant. Since we have a satellite broadband service in place, that is our gateway to the net. Our POS program is able to be emulated on PC's across the LAN through a Telnet service. We would like a better connection to the net than sattelite and would consider going to a T1 (or fraction there of).
We may not necassarily need the functionality of the network applications we have in place other than the POS software. We may be able to duplicate the services we need on the extended location's LAN.
I guess my questions boil down to is VPN worth it/necassary for this application? Would there be a benefit to trying to implement a WAN? What is the possibility of runnning Voice and Data across a leased line (i.e frame relay) application? What are the expenses involved in VPN? Does it sound like we would be better off with RAS service in place for our POS software (which we are currently running on a few of our remote locations where there is only one Terminal in place at those locations.)(Just a note about our POS software, it is written in PIC and runs on an NT4 backbone as a thin client (of sorts) through Telnet.)
Any suggestions or thoughts on the best way to integrate our voice and data for the remote locations, while keeping the cost to a minimum? BTW, I don't know much about voice over IP, and have heard some bad reports about it.
Sorry if this is the wrong forum, I looked at others, and this seemed to make the most sense.
TIA, RUssell
We may not necassarily need the functionality of the network applications we have in place other than the POS software. We may be able to duplicate the services we need on the extended location's LAN.
I guess my questions boil down to is VPN worth it/necassary for this application? Would there be a benefit to trying to implement a WAN? What is the possibility of runnning Voice and Data across a leased line (i.e frame relay) application? What are the expenses involved in VPN? Does it sound like we would be better off with RAS service in place for our POS software (which we are currently running on a few of our remote locations where there is only one Terminal in place at those locations.)(Just a note about our POS software, it is written in PIC and runs on an NT4 backbone as a thin client (of sorts) through Telnet.)
Any suggestions or thoughts on the best way to integrate our voice and data for the remote locations, while keeping the cost to a minimum? BTW, I don't know much about voice over IP, and have heard some bad reports about it.
Sorry if this is the wrong forum, I looked at others, and this seemed to make the most sense.
TIA, RUssell