Case Study - Upgrading to ADSL broadband
Company - Camelot
Marketing Services
Users : 10
CMS are a local company who
specialise in marketing campaigns for all type of business and a lot
of their research and analysis is done on the internet. Up to now they
have used dial-up modems to connect to the internet and although it
was fine in the beginning the level of internet usage has soared to
the point where web browsing is becoming too slow. CMS contacted Novastream
to see what could be done to improve internet access times for their
users.
There are currently six ways of gaining an improvement in internet access times:
- Leased Line
- ADSL
- Cable
- Wireless
- ISDN
- Satellite
The options available are dependent on location and funds available. We first looked at the amount CMS were spending on their internet access annually. This made interesting reading as they had 2 machines with modems and the combined call costs and provider fees were over £100 per month.
We then checked the various options for improving the access speed. Leased line costs were way out of budget so we looked at ADSL broadband from BT. Fortunately ADSL was available in their area and this would easily be the best option given that most of their usage of the internet was for downloads of web pages and files. There were two BT Broadband packages that were appropriate in terms of speed and cost.
| Service | Speed | Increase | Install cost | Monthly Charge | Monthly Saving |
| BT Openworld Busess 500 | 512Kb/s | 10 x | £0 | £65 | £45 |
| BT Openworld Business 1000 | 1Mb/s | 20 x | £0 | £100 | £10 |
CMS opted for the Business 1000 service because it is gives a huge increase in bandwidth and save the company a small amount each month. The extra bandwidth will be sufficient for the next 1-2 years which is good strategic planning. As time goes on the price of the next higher speed link will have reduced so they will be able to upgrade for almost no extra cost.
Firewall and Security
The BT ADSL service is delivered without a firewall (although they will
sell you one) so Novastream recommended a good firewall/router to protect
the CMS network from internet attack and also to enable all machines
on the network to access the internet at the same time.
Homeworking
A further benefit of the firewall was that it enabled staff to work
from home. The firewall we recommended has the facility to create secure
tunnels through the internet from authorized users at home into the
CMS network, using a technology called Virtual Private Networks or VPNs.
For staff who also had broadband at home it meant they could work from
home with full access to all the marketing databases and files on the
servers at a reasonable speed.
Network Diagram
This is the final configuration of the CMS network after the installation
of ADSL broadband
