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Home vs. Away
It costs about 30 percent more to support a home user than to support an office user. Here's A rundown of the expenses:
Remote-access costs: $600 to $1,000 per year Phone-line expenses: $700 per year
Shipping costs for equipment: $200 to $500 |
2. Offer High-Speed Connectivity
Broadband, broadband, broadband: The greater speed you can provide your home users, the better. That means a VPN, as well as remote-control software for the times you need to take control of the user equipment.
There are several options for remote access. For a full-time home user, our first choice is any high-speed service--cable modem, DSL or bidirectional satellite--all of which serve as a conduit to our VPN servers.
Cable is the most widely available high-speed Internet option, the easiest to set up and, in our experience, the most reliable. Cable-modem services typically offer 1-Mbps Internet access. But because cable service is based on shared media, throughput depends on the amount of traffic on that segment of the network. As for equipment, all you need is a cable modem that moves the signal off the coax wire to the Ethernet and a computer with an Ethernet jack. We typically provide cable-modem users with a small SOHO firewall router for security.
DSL is a close second in terms of popularity, and it provides 128 Kbps to 12 Mbps downstream and 128 Kbps to 1 Mbps upstream, depending on the service and the user's location. A minimum of 256 Kbps downstream is best.
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