Telecommunications At Work

Telecommunications at Work

The telecommunications philosophy you use in our business environment can be very important to the survival of your business. This is also true of the physical and virtual hardware and protocols that are utilized by those philosophies. This paper will discuss what philosophies and technologies were used in the implementation of the office network for Testing Data Services (TDS).

WAN

The WAN for TDS is made up of two Sprint T1 data lines bound together into a single 3-megabit connection. This is accomplished by a Cisco 2620 with two WAN Interface Cards (WIC). WICs take the place of older external Data Service Units/Channel Service Units (DSU/CSU) and are much easier to install and configure. Other features of using a WIC card over external DSU/CSUs are: fewer devices and cables to deploy and manage, single-vendor support, enhanced reliability, and physical space savings (Cisco, 2005). A DSU/CSU unit is a device that is responsible for connecting a terminal to a digital line (Webopedia - DSU/CSU, 2005). This entire setup fits into 1U. A U is the standard unit of measure for designating the vertical usable space, or height of racks and cabinets. 1U is equal to 1.75 inches (Webopedia - 1U, 2005).

LAN

Once the data connection is made to the Cisco router the signal is sent to a 10/100 Netgear switch. There are only two devices plugged into this first switch, the Cisco router and a firewall. The firewall is what protects our servers and LAN from the outside world. The firewall that our company chose to use was the SmoothWall Corporate Server. SmoothWall Corporate Server is a modular firewall system that converts a standard Pentium class PC into a dedicated hardware firewall appliance (Corporate Server 3.0, 2005). The firewall has two Network Interface Cards (NIC) installed. One card is plugged into the outside (public) side of the network and the other NIC is plugged into the inside (private) Local Area Network (LAN). This LAN connection is up-linked into a 10/100/1000 Netgear switch which facilitates fast data transfers between our 10 personnel workstation and 8 servers. Access to these servers is monitored and regulated by the Corporate Server Firewall and only the ports that require access are open to the public. In the future we plan to further protect the servers by further segregation onto a separate subnet of the network.

Voice and Fax

Voice and Fax communications are by far the simplest telecommunications setups within our office. We currently utilize two telephone lines for office voice communications. The main number is set to hunt to the second line in the event that it is busy. We also have a distinctive