The use of VSAT to extend the company LAN to all its retail sites

Large retail sites such as department stores and supermarkets, and medium sized sites such as bank branches and motor dealerships, now commonly use telecommunications between a number of terminals and printers onsite. Companies have an increasing need to communicate operations information such as sales transactions, stock orders, POS authorisation, pricing tables and business statistics in real time, between the retail branch and the central business. Many of them also see benefit in extending administrative support services such as electronic mail, company news, and access to central databases from headquarters into the branch. The use of local area networks within both headquarters and branch environments is the natural choice, since they give ease of cabling and connection, and support all types of service without restriction in throughput or numbers of terminals. However, interconnection of the HQ to all the branch LANs presents the communications manager with some difficult problems in obtaining satisfactory data throughput and reliability, while keeping costs of transmission, equipment, and network management to a reasonable level. The paper shows how VSAT technology solves many of these problems and provides, in many cases, the best price/performance tradeoff for distributed networking requirements