UUNET SA gives your employees world-wide access to your LAN

Through its new Virtual Private Dial-up Network (VPDN) service, UUNET SA will enable organisations to give remote workers access to their corporate network. UUNET SA, having evolved from the country`s oldest and biggest ISP, is South Africa`s leading corporate Internet network provider.

Says Edwin Thompson, UUNET SA`s technical director: "Usually employees can only access their LAN if they are sitting in their office and using a workstation that is already linked to the LAN. With our VPDN service, an authorised employee sitting anywhere in the world can dial up and connect to the company`s LAN - a considerable boost to their productivity."

In a mixture of dial-up and dedicated access technologies - utilising the Layer 2 Tunelling Protocol (L2TP) - UUNET SA`s VPDN service makes available to a customer organisation dedicated ports on a UUNET access server. The access server creates a secure tunnel into the corporate network via a dedicated router situated at the customer`s premises.

A remote user, using any telecommunications technology, can dial in to the nearest UUNET point of presence (PoP) and establish a tunnel into the customer`s LAN. The remote user may use any LAN protocol, such as IPX, TCP/IP, Netbios or Appletalk.

For extra customer security and privacy, the data packets can be encrypted. The encryption is end-to-end, initiating at the remote user`s machine and terminating inside the corporate network on the router. This enables the data packets to be carried securely over any medium, including a UUNET public network or the Internet.

Says Thompson: "Because of the total cost of owernship advantage, we can provide customers with the service at a lower cost than if the customer were to build and manage his own infrastructure. Our service includes the management and maintenance of the infrastructure end-to-end - that is, from our own equipment and the public telecommunications lines and links all the way through to the router that sits at the customer`s premises.

"In addition, we provide the customer`s IT administrator with all the tools to fully manage, in-house, user authorisation for and access to the VPDN - as he would for the LAN. The tools also generate reports on the VPDN, so that usage of the facility can be monitored and refined by the customer as necessary."