VPN for hotels

[admin_2]

I am currently doing my final year project, at the

university college in

Northamptonshire, England. I was wondering if you could help me with some

advice on Virtual Private Networks. The project scenario is that I have 134

hotel sites nation wide, and would like to add the facility of high speed

(broadband)internet access to each of the 52 guest rooms for business men

and women, for there laptops, and maybe a separate LAN Conference room.

Each hotel will be connected to a central headquarters via a VPN network.

The headquarters will need a Finance database server, with required security

for the transactions, and bookings, a Web server for the company website and

a facility for Video conferencing. I have looked at some of the web pages

you offer to show the basic idea of the setup, but I was wondering if you

could give me an indication the components needed to achieve the scenario

mentioned, with a budget of £1.885.669.01 for the whole project. If

possible could you include some prices of the equipment? Thank You very

much for your time, any help will be appreciated.

Thank You.

[ali-franks]

Hi Stephen,

I can try and point you to a start here, although I must stress that I haven't actually played with LRE kit yet, but it seems reasonably straight forward! So here are a few suggestions...

1. For the hotels you may want to look at Long Reach Ethernet to provide Broadband services to the rooms. It uses the exisiting telephone cabling without a requirement to rewire the whole building in Cat5 or Cat5e.

2. Web browsing could be supplied by a DSL technology.

3. ISDN is a popular video conferencing medium although call charges can be quite high. The hardware can expensive but that depends on what sort of standard you want to supply to the customer.

4.If you use a VPN to the central site, this will add overhead to both the traffic running over the web service router, in terms of banwidth - and the router itself, so think about bandwidth requirements, router capability etc.

5. You may want to consider the use of PIX as security devices and VPN tunnel end-points. Expensive but good!

6. The web server could sit in a DMZ at the central site, behind a PIX

The scenarios are plentiful and it'll take quite a lot of work to come up with a decent proposal in terms of budgetary constraints. Lot's of scenario building required here!

A lot of people read these forums and I'm sure there are plenty who can nail down things far better than I can but I hope this is of some help. I can't give you prices I'm afraid.

Ali