At 7/13/2001 02:39 PM (Friday), Paul Schmidt wrote:

>Put a big server into the Toronto office, put a fraction of a T1 from
>each office, to the Internet Backbone. Then use a VPN tunnel to
>connect Vancouver to the server in Toronto.

What's the alternative? Even if you had a server and database in each
office they would have to be cross-updated at some point, right? Therefore,
you still need the Internet+VPN connection for that so you have not saved
much.

I would look into DSL as an alternative to fractional T1. Also, companies
like www.yipes.com are offering very cheap IP bandwidth (above a certain
minimum) with managed networks and bandwidth-on-demand features. With their
product you could arrange for 128KB/sec bandwidth during the working day to
cover net browsing and 2MB/sec bandwidth for 2 hours each night to cover an
intense database replication exchange.

Just some thoughts.