* Squeezing more out of existing WAN links
Premier Community Bank, headquartered in rural Marion, Wis., runs seven remote bank branch sites. Vice president of operations Pat Mielke sums up the bank’s situation: “We’re in central Wisconsin. Accessibility to network options is not plentiful. And where there are options, they are expensive.”
A year ago, when the bank decided to bring all its remote offices onto its online teller system to improve customer service, it was running 56K bit/sec private lines from all the remote sites to headquarters. With real-time access to the central financial resources going on all day long, these speeds were no longer adequate.
“At some offices, we can’t even get T-1 lines. For those we could get, the total monthly network service charge was going to be $8,500 a month. When you’re a $134 million bank, you can’t afford that,” says Mielke.
She says she “struggled for five months” with DSL in three offices, but it just wasn’t reliable enough for mission-critical traffic. “[The service] was bouncing up and down all the time,” she says.
Mielke says she had nearly resolved that the bank might have to deconvert from the system entirely when Premier’s outsourcer, Network Solutions, rode in on a white horse and suggested testing Expand Networks’ Accelerator appliances-devices that use caching and adaptive compression algorithms to eliminate repeat content across WAN links.
“[Expand] marketed their products as delivering about four times the [actual] line speed, and we’re indeed seeing that,” says a much-relieved Mielke.
She calculated that her upfront capital investment was about $28,000 (one $2,000 device at each of seven remote sites; for each remote device, a corresponding device is needed at headquarters, for a total of 14 devices). With an upgrade to T-1s in each site, she would have shelled out that much in incremental services fees in just over three months.
For companies like Premier Bank-located in remote, rural areas where terrestrial service providers are not particularly motivated to build out network infrastructure-advances in IP VPN satellite technology could soon become another strong alternative. Check out this week’s “Network World Wireless in the Enterprise” newsletter for performance and security advances with satellite technology.
