* Equant's VPN services come in three versions
Equant is offering remote access VPN services based on a wide variety of vendors’ gear placed at customer sites.
Part of Equant’s Small Office Solutions services, the new VPN offering is available in North America and comes in three versions.
The first service is called Advantage and is for offices with up to five users. It connects a site to the Internet via a DSL or cable connection supported by a router supplied by the carrier.
The second service, called Select, is based on a business class ADSL access line, service-level agreements and access to Equant’s network rather than the Internet at large. It also includes a router and is designed for larger sites with up to 25 employees.
The final service is Premier, which includes an SDSL access line to the Equant network, is designed for offices with up to 50 employees and is meant to replace leased line services.
Equant is reselling an underlying service supported by GoRemote, which supplies Cisco, Juniper, SonicWall or Zyxel customer-site routers to create IPSec VPN tunnels between the remote offices and headquarters or data centers.
The service is fully managed and may be a good choice for customers with many small locations such as retail chains where increasing IT staff is not an option. It may be especially attractive to businesses that are increasing the amount of applications crossing the network between remote offices and headquarters and where dial-up connections or satellite connections (with their inherent delays) are causing bottlenecks.
