INTERNET FOR INTERNATIONAL TRAVELERS and SMALL OFFICE - ON-LINE !!

This article is, of necessity, somewhat technical. But, it should give the Manager a conceptual understanding of the subject while still providing enough information for the systems people to further develop these concepts to meet the unit's specific requirements.

UNIVERSAL INTERNET ACCESS

One of the major problems facing travelers is access to the Internet for connection to corporate and other services. We have been working with hotel management companies who are facing this problem every day, especially for their executives who travel internationally.
Within the US the problem is not difficult to solve or expensive. The travelers must have accounts with a nationwide provider like AT&T, MCI, Mindspring, Netcom or others.

International access is a problem because each country has its own providers, introducing the need to make long distance calls or use an international 800 type access to reach the US.

Internet service providers have banded together, on a worldwide basis to alleviate this problem. They have set up a consortium called Global Reach Internet Connection (GRIC) network that utilizes software developed by AimQuest Corporation to allow travelers to call into a local Internet service provider and be treated as if they are connected to their 'home' service. Critical to this group is the recent addition of Netcom, a nationwide provider of service within the US. As a result there are now about 40 countries, including the US, where a traveler can use a local Internet service for $4 to $6 per hour to make connections to his personal or business accounts, without having to have an account within each country.

SMALL OFFICE - BIG CONNECTION

We have been talking about the future and theories for the last year. It is now time to review a real application of communications.
Our small office recently upgraded its communications system to allow more effective connections to the outside world. The systems that we installed and approach that we took can be applied to most hotel administrative operations. It could also streamline many standalone foodservice operations.

Prior to the change, we had been utilizing dialup connections to reach the outside world. While functional, the approach was slow and almost always required manual intervention. At the very least, the computer making the connection became very slow because of the processing overhead associated with "serial communications". You could perform other functions, but, you often had to wait for the screen to catch up with your typing.

Our change was relatively small technically. The result was, however, dramatic on performance. We added an inexpensive ISDN router to our three PC network. We also added a 'shareware' mailserver to offload the PC program overhead. Interestingly enough, all of the network, mail and WEB server functions were added to the 'obsolete' 486/66 PC that I am using to write this article - and performance improved.

The new network allows us to replace two telephone lines with the digital service for about $20 a month more in service.

The big change however is that we can now load up to 8 different hosts into the router and our local network will treat them as if they are always connected. Connections take a second or less (if you monitor the router).and are barely noticeable. The system hangs up whenever it is not used for 30 seconds or so which saves big money in areas that charge message units. How often do you study or browse through a single complex WEB page? With this approach, most of the time you will be off-line and not even know it.

While our office only utilizes TCP/IP, this specific router also supports IPX (Novell) and frame relay. The cost is very low for the capabilities provided: $720 for the Router and $200 for the ISDN installation. Most amazing was that it worked on the first try.

Hotel & food service operations could use this one device approach for connecting to their various service providers including corporate & regional offices, credit card verification, credit card account clearing, product and service providers.

The two ISDN "B" channels can be used to transfer about 1 million Bytes per minute to two different locations at the same time. The "D" channel can be set to be on-line all the time for credit card related activities.

The speed impact is shown in more than just the communications line acceleration. The overhead in the PC is dramatically reduced because the transmission is through a "LAN" connection which does not place a burden on the PC. Even the best of serial communications require that the PC handle between 1 to 16 characters at a time. Out TCP/IP setting allows blocks of 1500 characters to sent at one time there by reducing the number of PC processing 'interruptions' by 99%.

Care must be taken in the selection process. Routers by different manufacturers have very different capabilities. Also, buying an 'ISDN Modem' that installs as a card in a PC does not provide the capabilities discussed above. Other PC's cannot access it without burdening the host PC and these cards are still treated as serial devices that add big overhead when you try to utilize the full speed of the ISDN connection - 128 Kbps, basic, up to 500 Kbps compressed.

Let me know if you would like to hear more details specific to an application. Also, for anyone who would like to know more about the basics of ISDN and its business applications, we can provide a copy by E-Mail of a document that we assembled on the subject. All we need is your Internet E-Mail address. Send any requests to:

INFO@FUTURETECH.COM