The Right Hook for the Office

By Bill Fick

Last week, in my first installment of a consumer’s guide to Internet connectivity in Russia, I discussed access options for individual users. This week’s column takes the notion of "connectivity" a step further and focuses on creative approaches to group Internet use in offices.

As an office grows, it can become increasingly cumbersome--and expensive--to use individual network logons via modem connections from individual computers. If an entire office shares a single e-mail address and a secretary manually distributes printed messages to individual recipients and collects outgoing files on diskette, the unique value in the paperless immediacy and confidentiality inherent to e-mail is lost. It is likewise inefficient when modems proliferate among individual employees who, throughout the day, simultaneously compete for limited office phone lines and waste time struggling with busy signals and lost connections as they attempt to send/receive e-mail and search for information on the Web.

In an office with multiple computers, economies of scale make it more efficient to create a local area network (LAN) connecting all of the computers internally and establish a single channel for e-mail and Internet traffic to the outside world.

Inexpensive "e-mail-only" solutions to provide individual e-mail addresses to every employee and workstation in the office are relatively easy to implement using good, free software or integrated commercial packages such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus cc:MAIL or Novell Groupwise. Individuals can send/receive e-mail from their workstations with the touch of a button, and a single computer in the office periodically dials out via modem to a network provider to send and receive accumulated messages.

A more robust solution entails establishing a single dedicated (‘round-the-clock) high-speed connection from your office LAN to the Internet. Every employee can then send and receive e-mail from his or her computer instantly and use the Web simultaneously, without the frustration and time lost on dialing and poor connections.

Putting an office LAN on-line with a dedicated connection requires the following elements:

1) A server/router. Depending on the size of the office and level of performance and security required, this can range from an inexpensive PC running a free operating system such as Linux to a fancy and complex array of powerful workstations and routers costing tens of thousands of dollars.

Like the risks inherent to every part of business and life, Internet security risks are real but eminently manageable. The key to maintaining a safe network is to formulate and implement a coherent security policy. This includes decisions about levels of access for specific individuals, creation of a firewall to separate and control traffic between your LAN and the outside world, and ongoing vigilance.

2) "Last mile" connection. It is necessary to establish a permanent high-speed connection between your office system and an Internet Service Provider, which can be a daunting task given Moscow’s chaotic telecommunications infrastructure.

The simplest option is to maintain a dial-up modem connection 'round-the-clock, but this is not ideal since one of your phone lines will be constantly busy, the connection will be unstable and all of the workstations in your office will be sharing a low-speed (less than 28.8 kilobits/second) connection.

Alternatively, you can lease a dedicated copper telephone wire (vydelennnaya linia) from the city telephone company’s SpetsUzel for a pittance (around $50/month). If the physical length of the connection between your office and the ISP is less than seven to 10 kilometers (not necessarily the same distance "as the crow flies" between the two locations since the wire may travel indirectly through several city telephone switches), you can achieve good data speeds in excess of 64 kb/sec over such a line. If you are farther away, however, you will be limited by the same 28.8 kb/sec ceiling.

The other problem with SpetsUzel is that they move glacially like most quasi governmental institutions here, and are prone to respond that there are no "free pairs" in your building or "technical capacity" to establish a line.

Moscow’s antiquated telephone infrastructure is based on pairs of copper wire bundled into thicker cables which run between various buildings and the nearest telephone switch (ATS). Each copper pair represents the physical capacity to provide one telephone line. In some cases, it may in fact be true that all of the pairs in your building are occupied, but sometimes the telephone company loses the paper trail for entire cables and will insist that everything is impossible even if you see 50 empty pairs on the telephone box in your hallway with your own eyes. Of course, you can have a new cable strung between your building and the ATS, but this can be an expensive and seemingly endless undertaking.

A more expensive, but typically faster and reliable "last-mile" option is to order a point-to-point digital connection from any of a number of telecommuncations companies in Moscow which provide such services for about $800/month (64 kb/sec). One thing to remember, however, is that even these companies often depend on the presence of "free pairs" in your building in order to reach your actual office. Newer office complexes often have fiber-optic links into various telecom companies’ city backbones, which simplifies matters on the one hand but may restrict your choice of provider on the other.

A final option which can be explored in limited circumstances is a radio-modem connection, with which you can achieve speeds of up to 2 megabits per second after a $5,000-$10,000 investment in initial hardware with little or no monthly cost. Radio modems are hardly a panacea, however, since they have limited range, require line-of-sight visibility between the points to be connected, and may not perform reliably under unusual weather or background conditions.

3) Internet Service Provider. You need to choose a provider which can offer dedicated connectivity and routing at the data speed you desire.

The criteria you use to choose a provider for dedicated office access are much the same as those to choose a dial-up provider: quality and bandwidth of the ISP’s external channel, "peer routing" with other Russian networks, as well as price/customer service considerations. In Moscow, the cost for a 64 kb/sec dedicated connection averages around $600/month.

In the bigger picture, the trend in Moscow is toward better "last mile" accessibility and lower prices across the board. Soon, live Internet access in offices here may become as commonplace as it has in the United States. If Lenin’s Communism managed quickly to bring electricity to the vast remote expanses of Russia, we can hope that market forces will have similar effect with the Internet.