"Wireless is huge," says Lamonica. "It's great for workers who spend a lot of time at job sites. They can fire up a laptop without worrying about rooting around for a Category 5 cable."
Going wireless simplified life for the IT department as well. "Instead of having to pop in more hubs and manage connectivity for more users, if the trailer is wirelessly enabled, we need only one hub at each site, with the wireless access points using one port," says Lamonica.
Wireless technology also eases training. "We have a mobile hands-on training environment consisting of a number of laptops configured for wireless that we can ship to regional offices, and our trainers don't have to figure out cabling or attaching to the network in order to set up a classroom and conduct training," he explains.
The stable network has given Rudolph and Sletten leverage with vendors. "We can now go to DSL or frame relay providers, for instance, and provide hard-core evidence about how poor their performance is," says Lamonica.
And it all goes back to the ability to monitor Rudolph and Sletten's infrastructure. "If we hadn't been able to get a grip on our unstable environment and find out where we needed to plug gaps, we wouldn't have been able to justify this," he says. Is your enterprise making innovative use of a networking technology or service that you'd like us to write about? Contact Jim Carr, an Aptos, CA-based freelance business and technology writer, at [email protected].
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