Dell is using wireless LAN technology to make it easy for mobile employees to bring their work with them as they move between offices or even between the growing number of sites the company has across the country and indeed Europe.
It is hardly surprisingly that as the world’s leading supplier of personal computers, Dell offers its customers options to buy network adapter cards to fit into their systems. Wireless LANs are no exception and the company now offers both a PC Card option on its low-end notebooks, and a built in wireless LAN adapter for its more expensive offerings. And at Dell itself we saw workers making use of both types of equipment.
The business case for using wireless technology was something of a no-brainer for Dell. During the course of their working week, many of Dell’s employees spend time at more than one of its sites, of which it has five in Ireland alone. The ability to bring their work with them without having to endure the headache of finding a vacant network slot in which to stick their LAN cable and then fiddle with all their settings, is a great benefit.
It was illustrated perfectly during the course of my visit to the company’s office. A senior executive had joined us in the meeting room in which we were ensconced and when the conversation turned to a topic of no interest to him, he popped open his notebook computer and started answering some e-mails. ‘I hope you don’t think I’m just here as part of the demonstration,’ he quipped.
The company started making wireless connectivity available to its European workforce just over a year ago, according to Andrew White, a member of Dell’s EMEA network engineering team. One has to make a business case to be equipped with a wireless-enabled notebook, but mobile workers are encouraged to avail of the opportunity.
White says that there are now nearly 800 Dell employees in Europe with wireless LAN connectivity, out of a total PC-using workforce of 6,000.
At its simplest, building a wireless LAN involves simply fitting an adapter card into the notebook computer and attaching a wireless basestation to a point in the corporate network.
The main concern that Dell had with giving its staff wireless access to the corporate LAN was not bandwidth but security. There is a supposedly secure connection, called WEP (wireless encryption protocol), built into the network between the wireless adapter cards and the basestation, but according to Dell, this can be hacked by a determined eavesdropper in 15 minutes. Consequently, this was deemed not to be secure enough for people gaining access to vital company data so Dell had to beef up its security infrastructure before it deployed wireless LANs.
What the company did was to install a VPN (Virtual Private Network) server between the wireless base station and the corporate LAN. This means that anybody trying to gain access wirelessly has to go through a rigid identity and authorisation check before they are allowed to gain access to the network. ‘We used inherent features available with Windows 2000 and secure protocols like PPTP and L2TP on the VPN server,’ said White. ‘For the notebooks themselves, we use features supplied with Windows 98, Windows 2000 or Windows XP. With these features, secure tunnelling paths between the notebook and the LAN can be configured easily.’
As well as those security features, Dell also recommends that its notebook users take additional precautions like setting passwords to protect their hard drives and folders and changing their default secure ID number.
Wireless base stations are installed in every one of Dell’s Irish sites as well as the company’s offices throughout Europe. Typically, each basestation can support 35 users, according to White. ‘If we have more users than that, we can simply add another base station,’ he said. In theory, the range at which a wireless user can access the base station is 160m, although in practice in an office environment, the usable distance is a lot less than that. However, apart from the largest sites, a single base station should provide ample coverage for the entire building.
Although wireless bandwidth is currently very much less than that of wired Ethernet, White claims that most users do not notice any degradation in performance. ‘Wireless would be unsuitable if you were doing things like accessing digital video or voice conferencing,’ he said. ‘Background file transfer takes place in a matter of seconds and e-mail is the most important application that our mobile users need, so the wireless LAN is fine for their needs.’
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