The days of trying to access the company intranet from a spotty dial-up connection in a hotel room is becoming a thing of the past. More companies are tapping into the growing number of cost-efficient services that provide mobile employees with online access via a variety of channels, including Wi-Fi, wireless broadband, and cellular.
For Continental Airlines, switching to a remote-access service from Fiberlink Communications Corp. has resulted in substantial cost savings, the airline says. Continental managers and salespeople used to grapple with four remote-access options from different vendors using different interfaces while signing on from their laptops, and often they were frustrated by sluggish dial-up connections, says Stacey Thomas, senior manager of communications technology at Continental. Additionally, it was difficult for the IT staff to manage costs for the various connectivity options. "At the end of the month we would get a big bill and would have no way to tell who was using what," Thomas says.
Fiberlink Extend 360 lets the airline provide mobile employees with one interface for signing on through Wi-Fi, dial-up, broadband, or cellular. The software comes with options for security firewalls and antivirus, patch-management, and anti-spyware software developed by vendor partners, and also integrates with Continental's Cisco VPN client. The options eliminate the need for users to launch security-related windows and make security more manageable, says William Wagner, chief marketing officer at Fiberlink.
On Wednesday, Fiberlink will unveil an upgrade to Extend360. Fiberlink has integrated wireless technology into the service known as CDMA EV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimized), a high-speed data enhancement to the latest generation of CDMA cell-phone technology. EV-DO offers download data rates of up to 2.4 Mbps and gives mobile workers another wireless option over tightly clustered Wi-Fi hot-spots and sluggish cellular and dial-up connections. EV-DO is commercially available in 30 major U.S. markets and is rapidly expanding nationwide.
Continental deployed Fiberlink's Extend360 in January 2003 to provide access for more than 1,500 employees in 150 cities. Remote access is necessary for traveling employees to be able to send and receive E-mail, tap into Continental's intranet and customer database, and access seat inventory and flight operations.
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Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
