SMB Networks / Telework /

Communications companies stay ahead of the curve

By Toni Kistner
Net.Worker, 12/18/00

According to industry lore, the first teleworker was a Boston bank president who, in 1877, had a phone line strung from his office to his home in Somerville, Mass. Fast-forward 123 years, and that bank president could be your CEO, an Alpha mobile executive who's clamoring for access to company resources from his home, from the road, from a ship in the Mediterrean - from wherever he happens to be.

Good thing technology's keeping pace with these guys, who are doing more today to drive the remote worker boom than any telework initiative or government program ever has, or could hope to. In fact, a pair of products announced today might sprint a length or two ahead of their expectations.

The first comes from San Jose, Calif. 2Wire. The residential gateway manufacturer announced the Integrated Communications System (about $999), a combined data/voice gateway that lets you network PCs and share DSL. It also lets you network analog telephones as if they were PCs, in essence creating a home PBX that runs over DSL and uses Home PNA (phone line networking) technology.

ICS lets you add, subtract, and manage as many as four phone lines (and many more extensions) using a browser interface. Moreover, it lets you connect to the corporate packet voice network, allowing mobile execs and teleworkers the ability to use one phone system (and number) at home and in the office. There's a built-in VPN with full IP security support, so you can create a single household data (and voice) network to share a DSL connection and to tunnel into the company servers with your corporate PC.

While the idea of a DSL gateway spawning multiple phone lines and extensions is alluring, relying on your DSL provider for phone service isn't. If your DSL connection goes down, so goes your phone service. That's why the gateway also supports plain old telephone service lines, and if the power goes out, the system reverts back to POTS, according to Roy Johnson, 2Wire's vice president of marketing and business development.

Even so, Johnson acknowledges DSL providers' unwillingness to back up their $39/month consumer offerings with service-level agreements (SLA) could put a drag on the adoption of 2Wire's voice/data gateway.

"The DSL market needs to get a little sanity back into it," Johnson says. "On the one hand, $39 pricing promotes demand, but the problem is the providers can't make any money and they certainly can't offer SLAs. We're hopeful that the DSL industry collectively is going to solve this problem, and that you'll start seeing SLAs with consumer and small business services in the next three to six months."

2Wire will demonstrate the gateway at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, and expects to ship product in March.

The second announcement comes from the mobile front. GlobalStar USA, which provides wireless phone services via its satellite network (as opposed to a "terrestrial" cellular one), today announced the addition of data capability to the service. The Qualcomm GSP-1600 multimodal phone operates in analog cellular (AMPS), digital Cellular (CDMA), as well as on the GlobalStar satellite network (CDMA), which means it provides coverage throughout the U.S. and most of the world, according to vice president and general manager Dennis McSweeny.

Using the new data kit, subscribers connect their phones (which are upgraded with modem functionality) to their laptops or PDAs via a data cable to access the Web, e-mail, search engines and instant messaging applications - from virtually anywhere. The company is targeting vertical industries, such as forestry, mining, and maritime, as well as the cellular extension market, which includes mobile execs and the remotest of remote workers.