Question

Mark Arnez of Aspen consulting has been contacted by a client who represents an international company with locations in your city, in Toronto, and in London. Each location has a plant for making parts for boilers used in large buildings. There also are sales and parts distribution offices at the plants. All buildings currently are networked using 10-Mbps communications to each workstation or server and 100-Mbps communications between floors. The client is exploring ways to link the business networks at all three locations. Form a team to determine the best way to connect the locations. Use the internet to research some gross estimates of the costs.

Answer 1

Answer:

The company already has effective LAN network at each locations. Hence no need of any work on connecing the systems within building and between buildings. So our main task is to connect these three LANs located at far distances across continents New York, Toronto and London.

First option: Internet

The least expensive way to achieve secure and reliable connectivity among the three LANs is connecting them through internet.The company can set up its own dedicated web servers or can use the Cloud hosting services.

Second option: Leased Lines(High Speed Internet leased lines)

The company can use leased lines to connect its branches. A leased line is a permanent non-switched end-to-end connection. There is no need of sending routing information along the data. They provide instant guaranteed method of delivery.They are suited to high volume and high speed data requirements. So very high speeds, high reliability and high security can be achieved by using leased lines. But the cost is high and goes up with data transmission rate.

Third option: ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode)

It is a high-performance, cell-oriented switching and multiplexing technology. It supports real-time voice, video and data transfer. ATM is widely used as a backbone technology in carrier networks and large enterprises. It is highly scalable and supports transmission speeds of 1, 5, 25, 100, 155, 622, 2488 and 9953 Mbps.

One of the important features of ATM is its ability to specify Quality of Service (QoS), allowing voice and video to be transmitted smoothly. It is costly compared ti Internet but economical compared to leased lines.

Fourth option: Switched Dial-Up Lines

It is the most common circuit provided by public communication carriers. But these are not generally suited for data transmission. Using a modem, the company can use its phone lines to dial-up a network service provider via the phone line and connect to the internet. With 4G/5G networks in place very high speeds can be achieved. This is also very affordable because of low cost.

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