A chain of drive-in restaurants trolling for a new branch office router settled on a lower-cost, higher-performing option: a remote wireless LAN access point with a cellular module.

Checkers Drive-In Restaurants, headquartered in Tampa, Fla., was looking to replace refurbished Cisco 1700 branch office routers connecting its 270 restaurants to an MPLS VPN service. But it wound up ditching the MPLS VPN in favor of an EV-DO Rev A cellular last-mile service from Sprint Nextel instead.

The approximately 2Mbps service is supported by an AP-70 from Wi-Fi company Aruba Networks. It works well, in part, because the network of restaurants is in a hub-and-spoke configuration with the data center, without site-to-site connectivity required.

Antonio Zambrano, Checkers' director of IT, explains, "We had 56Kbps connectivity at each restaurant, so we weren't really getting much performance out of [the network]." The connectivity was fine for point-of-sale transactions, but the company wanted to use the network for other applications, such as video training, which is now successfully under way using the cellular last mile, he notes.

Zambrano explored newer Cisco $1000-and-up branch office routers, which he deemed too pricey for his budget, as well as AdTran NetVanta routers, which he found affordable in the $300-plus range.

Then Zambrano heard about Aruba Networks' remote APs, which can simply bridge the branch office LAN to the corporate LAN across a cellular last-mile link to the Internet. The APs replicate the corporate VPN, access rights and policies at remote sites and are priced competitively with the NetVanta routers, he says.

To do this, Checkers runs a pair of Aruba 3200 WLAN controllers (for redundancy) in the data center. The controller pushes the centralized policies and configurations across the Internet and cellular links to the remote APs.

"We hadn't been looking for wireless, but once we heard about the features and the [Payment Card Industry standards] compliance built in to the Aruba equipment, we had to test it," Zambrano says.

The Aruba AP-70s are not part of the Aruba's newly announced Virtual Branch Network line, but are configurable as an office-extension product. Zambrano estimates that he has saved just under 50% compared with the NetVanta solution and about 75% compared with a Cisco router alternative. The company to date has installed 120 of the 270 nationwide APs.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.