"Green" is the right thing to do

With gasoline reaching $4.25/gallon, it has become expensive to commute. And our individual and collective concerns about the environment are leading us to rethink how the things we do contribute to global warming. So, why are we sitting in traffic every morning and afternoon?

How to be Green

Begin to embrace enterprise mobility, a very green technology. Provide employees a way to work from home that gives them identical access to what they have in the office, independent of the kind of computer they own or the brand of PBX the company has. Make the home environment as productive and as secure as the corporate LAN.

The Benefits

• Your employees will enjoy working more, and they'll do more work.
• While you are rolling out mobility, you are also rolling out disaster preparedness.
• Office costs can go down.
• Mobility allows mobile workers to hot-bunk office space if desired, further reducing office expenditure.
• In-office wireless access comes along for the ride.
• Your company can boast it's "greeness" to the community.

It will cost you nothing

Your employees are already aware of the money that they spend on gas each week. And everyone feels the frustration of commuter traffic. Establish a system where an employee can buy a "day at home" for about what it will cost them in fuel and frustration to commute. Use these funds to pay for the mobility infrastructure.

Remote access point technology is anchored at an Aruba WLAN controller on the corporate network. Remote access points (RAPs) create an IPSec tunnel back to the controller to provide the same SSIDs, same 802.1x authentication and encrpytion, same wireless counter-measures, same firewalling and network access that are available on the corporate LAN. Some AP models offer wired ports as well. This can accomodate VoIP telephones or general wired network connectivity tied to a VLAN back at corporate. Remote APs are plug-n-play. Because there's very little state kept on the AP, there is no end-user configuration, no updates to make and no network information needed beyond original configuration. All the employee does is plug it in.          More about remote access points

To make this work, you will need a pool of remote access points. During the preceding day, an employee buys use of a remote access point, and takes it home that evening for use the next day. They might even take their VoIP phone as well.

Where is the ROI?

Let's derive how much it costs in fuel and aggravation to commute each day. The figures below show the U.S. daily averages. Assume that a typical vehicle has a 25 MPG highway rating. The stop-and-go of heavy traffic reduces EPA mileage estimates by about 30%. From the effective mileage and cost of fuel, we can derive the daily commute cost to around $6/day.

Sources: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Traffic/story?id=485098&page=1
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/factors.shtml

The raw fuel costs don't capture wear and tear on the vehicle, nor the time-value waste of driving to and from work. The frustration has a premium as well.

Now, let's price a wireless LAN system capable of providing remote access for a maximum of 16 users. Note that we can use the same infrastructure to provide secure wireless to the office. For argument, let's say that your office is 8000 square feet, traditional construction. It will be handily covered by four access points.

The above pricing is list-pricing, and includes an ample two days of professional services. Wireless IDS is part of the feature set, and will function for remote AP users as handily as it does in the office, protecting the network from the neighbors and providing remote radio management.

The system will pay for itself

Assume that an employee pays $10 for privilege to work a day at home. Furthermore, assume that an average of 8 employees a day take advantage of the program:

The above table says that the employees will pay for the basic cost of the system within ten months. The actual figures may be much better than that; the pricing above was 'list,' which is higher than you would actually expect to pay. And the soft benefits, including additional hours worked, may go far beyond the hard benefits.

No out-of-pocket expense

Halestar can arrange third-party leasing for the system, so there's never an out of pocket cost. It will be as if the wireless and mobility was free. If you like, we can manage and monitor the system as well. And we can take care of the pool of access points.

There's no reason not to do this.

Call us and we'll get you under way.

This page discusses the cost savings and benefits to being "green".