Choosing the right mobile provider is an important decision for any modern business with employees on the go. Technology is becoming increasingly mobile, and for many SMEs, the difference between a good day and a bad day can come down to just one call and their ability to respond.

A missed call or email, but particularly a delayed response to clients, could spell disaster for SMEs. It’s therefore important that businesses are fully mobile and accessible at all times. There are a variety of different mobile providers to choose from in Australia that cater for an ever-growing range of mobile services. Here are some important steps to take prior to choosing a mobile provider and some crucial questions to ask before you sign on the dotted line.

Assessment
First and foremost, you must assess and understand the mobile technology requirements for your business before examining your options. When considering the following points, keep in mind your company’s growth plans, as your mobile service will need to develop and grow as you do.

Level of access required:

• How many employees will share the company’s mobile plan?
• Do you have any employees that are regularly out of the office? For example, sales teams spending significant time on the road or employees working from home?
• On average, how much time do your employees spend on their desk phone vs. mobile phone? Do you need your mobile phone to act as both?
• Is email and internet usage an integral part of the way your business operates?
• Do you need to place restrictions on employee mobile usage, for example, the level of data they can download?
• How often do your employees travel both interstate and overseas?

Account management:

• Do you have an existing mobile contract that may affect negotiations with a new mobile provider? This will need to be flagged with your new mobile provider so that they can tailer a deal that’s right for you.
• Is your business currently supplied mobile services in addition to mobile solutions, such as mobile broadband? If so, how many suppliers across the business are involved? Can you benefit from streamlining your suppliers?
• Are your mobile services interoperable or stand-alone?
• Does your business have access to technology conducive to the level of mobile access you require, or do employees need a handset upgrade to enable them to be as efficient and productive as they can be?

Price
As in all business decisions, one of the crucial differentiators with choosing your mobile provider is price. Once you’ve assessed your mobile needs, it’s important you engage a mobile provider that can offer you the services you require at the best possible price; but look deeper than just the quoted call rate. Ensure you’re getting genuine value.

The flexibility of your mobile plan is key to maximising the cost-effectiveness of your corporate mobile solution. Most of the major mobile service providers in Australia provide a certain level of flexibility and scalability to their corporate customers, but it’s important you understand the structure of the plans being offered to ensure it’s the right one for you. Generally, the most cost-effective plan is one that lets a group of employees share from the same pool of talk-time, rather than bill each single employee separately on general call rates. A shared pool option allows for greater certainty in your mobile spend each month, minimising the chance of bill shock. It’s unusual for mobile service providers to charge their corporate customers in this way, so do your research to ensure you don’t exceed your budget allocation.

It’s also worth noting the flagfall rate of the corporate mobile plan you choose. Flagfall is a fixed fee that mobile service providers charge to connect each call, with the total cost deducted from the monthly value of a customer’s plan. Some mobile providers, such as Vodafone Australia, have removed flagfall from their corporate plans, allowing greater cost savings and account transparency for customers.

Coverage
Mobile network coverage—both locally and internationally  will directly affect your ability to use mobile services. When thinking about your business’ requirements, also think about the locality in which your employees operate, evaluating how far they travel and the mobile activity required to conduct business effectively in those areas. Do your employees spend 99 percent of their time in metropolitan areas? In which case, paying a costly premium to a mobile provider that guarantees you coverage in Uluru may not be the best way to spend your business dollar.  Australia’s leading mobile service providers, including Vodafone, Telstra and Optus, have reasonable levels of network coverage with further enhancements expected to take place mid-2009.

International travel is becoming a more frequent component of how SMEs operate, whether for client meetings, product selection or undertaking sales. It’s crucial that your mobile provider offers you the best global network coverage with the best international rates, so that you can operate with minimal fuss and disruption wherever you are. While most leading mobile service providers can connect you globally, Vodafone is the only mobile provider in Australia to have its own global network. For this reason, it is able to offer extensive roaming throughout the world, with call rates at the optimum level of value. As with domestic calls, it’s key your mobile service provider offers a clear pricing structure for their international call rates. You shouldn’t have to pay more to your bill to receive great value international rates. Look for service providers that allow you to add on tariff options to your bill for free.

The internet is more important than ever for small to medium businesses looking to maintain an edge over their rivals. Look for a mobile service provider that offers the most cost-effective mobile data plans abroad. For businessmen and women who need to travel regularly, their mobile broadband needs to be able to travel too, so look for a service provider that offers the best international coverage and roaming rates.

Technology
Your corporate mobile package isn’t just about network coverage and applications, but the ability to operate your business using the best technology available. When choosing your mobile provider look at the types of handsets available with each of the corporate plans. Look too at the add-on technology available for your mobile solution. It’s important your provider notifies you when upgrades and updates are available so that your technology is working as effectively as it can. Applications are also an integral part of maximising your technology, so check whether your mobile provider allows business-friendly applications such as GPS.

Customer service
A loss in communications for a business can mean a loss in sales so, if things go wrong (and they will from time to time) it’s important you have a dedicated team you can turn to for help. When it comes down to choosing a service provider, many SME owners will see quality customer service as a make or break component. A knowledgeable, reassuring voice at the end of the phone line can make a world of difference when in times of crisis.

Choosing a service provider based on its customer service qualities can be difficult, however there are a few stand-out features that SMEs can look for when making their appraisal. Firstly, evaluate whether your mobile service provider offers a one-stop-sho customer service centre, offering advice on all your telecommunications components. Secondly, check if your mobile service provider offers free customer service. Some service providers can charge a fee for customer service calls, so check the fine print. Also, check what hours they operate in. You don’t want to be stuck overseas with no mobile, no internet and no customer service. Look for a service provider that offers free 24/7 customer care; essential for business users who find themselves working late into the night, over weekends or while overseas.

For larger businesses, mobile service providers are able to offer dedicated account management teams. And, if you are based in Australia, you will want a dedicated client executive team based in Australia which understands your business, the local market and account, and can talk to you in your own timezone.

Solution
When looking at the mobile solution for your business, smart SMEs should also look at other ways to improve business efficiencies and consider consolidating mobile service suppliers into one. In fact, services such as mobile broadband, mobile internet, mobile calls, fixed-line calls and WiFi are all essential to keep your business viable in 2009 and give you an edge over the competition. Understandably, several types of communication solutions can cause a bit of a head ache for CFOs, with several separate bills potentially hitting their in-trays each month.

To help streamline your communications solution, try to look for a mobile service provider that offers an all-in-one solution, as one bill for all your communications services equals much less of a headache for SME business owners and CFOs. This approach allows for easier financial reporting and maximised cost savings. Furthermore, look for trusted brands that offer their services as part of an all-encompassing package. This needn’t mean a compromise on the viability of the package for your business, so make sure that the service you purchase is scalable to ensure a tailored solution that fits your business like a glove.

IP network services have brought such benefits and convenience to people’s life, work, business, investment, consumption, and entertainment that the whole society is relying more and more on them. The All-IP network, a future uniform IP bearer of data, voice and video, together with the multi-service operation over it, is attracting more and more attention from operators. It has become a hot topic in the industry at this time of centrury beginning.

However, because the IP network rises with Internet, as a multi-service bearer, its best effort transport and campus network architecture are challenged by the network security, reliability and manageability of carrier-class operation. Transformation from the best effort structure to a reliable, secure, and controllable carrier-class network, therefore, becomes necessary.

During the transformation, the traditional IP network is subject to the following challenges:

• Security Challenges

  All IP network is open. It allows all service terminals to access from anywhere at any time. The security access control of an ALL IP network, therefore, becomes a critical issue. The security of an IP network concerns four aspects:

  First, how to authenticate the legitimacy and creditability of service terminals that request to (users) access. Bearer services are complex. The network must enable varied means to authenticate the identity of a terminal to prevent account forgery and avoid harm to the network caused by attacks or service theft.

  Second, how to control terminal traffic. When a terminal accesses, its traffic must conform to the service agreement. Therefore, the network must achieve access control to restrict the ability and right of a terminal to access the network and other terminals and ensure that the terminal obtains services from the network in accordance with the defined service scope. Such control can prevent uncontrollable traffic from threatening other terminals and consuming network resources.

  Third, how to ensure service security. A multi-service bearer network must be able to detect illegal services and take actions in real time to prevent illegal traffic from eating up network resources.

  Forth, how to ensure network security. All kinds of network attack and embezzlement are threatening the normal operation of the network. A multi-service bearer network must assure all-round network security, to prevent harms to network security from many a possible attack.

• Operability and Manageability Challenges

  In early IP networks, access, aggregation, forwarding and service layers are not clearly distinguished. The IP network is incapable of realtime service detection and therefore unable to change dynamically with the service. The operator has little control of services carried over the IP network. As a result, diversified services have not created significant increase of benefits. The expansion of bandwidth only benefits ISPs and ICPs of voice, IM and games with cheap network resources. The operator can but rue the losses because it is incapable of network management specific to differentiated services.

  The future oriented multi-service IP bearer market requires fast service deployment and flexible service management. The operator can promote its operation benefits only by providing more and better experience for telecommunications users.

  Hence, how to achieve controllable network service is included in the agenda of the day.

• QoS Challenges

  Telecommunications users’ requirements on Service Level Agreement (SLA) are increasing. The pressure on network maintenance is also growing. In a multi-service bearer network, however, many types of services are transported over a same network and therefore the network must provide different QoS assurance for different types of services. The best effort manner will inevitably result in disorder contention for network resources. With it, an effective SLA is impossible. A multi-service IP bearer must support the agreement mechanism. Once an agreement is entered, it must provide assured services in accordance with the commitment. Especially in the case of realtime voice and video, carrier-class control mechanism must be applied to realize service-based QoS guarantee and management.

  Then it becomes critical to find a suitable technology and solution to guarantee the service level of the IP bearer network.

Huawei MSCG Broadband Multi-Service Bearer Solution

As shown in the figure below, the flat and hierarchical network structure enables the IP network to bear multiple services. The aggregation layer forwards and controls services.

This solution optimizes the IP network in the following aspects:

• Access mode is unrelated to the core network. At the network edge, the aggregation layer screens the difference of access modes and realizes convergence of the access layer. As services are carried over a uniform IP/MPLS core, cost for repetitive construction of the service network is spared.
• Functional planes are clear. The hierarchical structure divides the network to several planes including access, aggregation, core and application. The functionalities of equipment serving different planes are designed for specific purposes, which facilitates the ease of management and the scalability of services. Such mode allows for modular and simple network management and saves the network OPEX.
• Traffic converges at the network edge. Aggregation is to gather services from different access networks to the uniform core network for more efficient distribution. It simplifies access network management and improves the efficiency of network operation.

This solution intends for a simple IP network as a controllable, operable multi-service bearer. The edge aggregation solution and its basic utilities are especially important.

In the solution, the network edge aggregation layer controls service security and QoS to ease access network management and ensure that services accessed to the core are from legal identities. All traffic converges at the network edge before flowing to the core or access network. The aggregation capability of the aggregation layer equipment is then critical for effective operation support and management. Therefore, in an IP multi-service bearer network, the large capacity multi-service control gateway (MSCG) must be installed at the core network edge to check the legality of all user requests, realize dynamic service detection and differentiation, execute policy control, guarantee QoS, allocate network resources, and distribute traffic flows. The MSCG plays a vital role at the MAN edge.

To help operators realize broadband IP multi-service operation, Huawei has launched its large capacity MSCG, the ME60, which provides rich bearer control capabilities and carrier-class reliability. ME60 resolves the worries for IP multi-service bearer control:

Network Security

As a large capacity MSCG, ME60 considers securty control at the access, network and service layers:

• Access Layer Security

  1) ME60 authenticates the identity of terminals in the username+password or DHCP+ mode. This can effectively prevent account forgery. Such authentication differentiates between Internet access of PCs and IPTV access of STBs.

  2) The strong quintuplet based ACL flexibly controls accesses to the network. It assures that a terminal can only obtain network services within the allowable service scope.

  3) ME60 integrates Session Border Control (SBC) functions. At the border of access aggregation, it functions as the signaling agent of SIP, MGCP, H.248, and H.323 and the media agent of RTP/RTCP and HTTP for IP sessions. It also realizes the NAT/FW, supervision and measurement of media streams. All these guarantee the secure access of voice terminals.

• Network Layer Security

  1) ME60 utilizes ACL to isolate network layer resources, control network layer traffic, and ensure network layer transport security.
  2) ME60 supports rich protocol authentication means to guarantee service security at the network layer.

  3) For VoIP, ME60 isolates the NGN network and public terminals.

  4) ME60 integrates the state inspection firewall and Pinhole firewall. It can prevent all types of network attacks.

• Service Layer Security

  The adoption of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) can detect terminal services, supervise P2P traffic, analyze active packets, and enable policy control. Thus, ME60 can effectively prevent illegal traffic, ensure reasonable utilization of bandwidth, and guarantee network security. It allows the operator to execute content based charging and avoid unlimited consumption of network bandwidth.

Operability and Manageability

ME60 provides DPI based service management and Dynamic Service Gateway (DSG) based service operation to promote the operability and manageability of the whole network.

In terms of service management, ME60 uses DPI to differentiate service at the application layer and further apply different control policies according to the service type. The adoption of DPI changes the extensive management status to service based intensive network management and transforms the operator from “a pipeline provider” to “an integrated information provider”. DPI enables the operator to provide different service policies for different contents. DPI also enables the operator to have a correct idea of the network trend, making the network value increase because of services rather than bandwidth.

In terms of service operation, ME60 provides the DSG solution. With the DSG solution, users can select required services or bandwidth dynamically. Users can choose appropriate service parameters to achieve best service experience.

With the cooperation of flat hierarchical networking and the DSG solution, the operator can deploy value-added services quickly. Such a solution enables network resources to create significant and sustainable benefits for the operator through service operation.

Global QoS Guarantee

ME60 realizes global QoS guarantee from two aspects: excellent QoS performance and global QoS solution.

ME60 is capable of QoS control by stream classification, bandwidth control, priority scheduling and congestion avoidance, thus providing realtime bandwidth monitoring and quality QoS guarantee for any service of any user. ME60 also provides hierarchical scheduling by embedding a 5-level scheduler. When congestion occurs at some point in the access network, hierarchical scheduling can assure that important services are not lost. It guarantees the precedence of gold users over non-gold users. This avoids the weakening of bearer capability in the whole access network due to congestion at one node.

In terms of global QoS solution, ME60 works with the network resource manager to provide Connection Admission Control (CAC), thus realizing reasonable utilization of network bandwidth.

In this solution, when a user initiates a request for a value-added service, the network resource manager judges whether the network has enough bandwidth resources to assure this service. When it finds that the resource is insufficient, it rejects the request. It only accepts the request when the bandwidth resource is sufficient. Then ME60 executes corresponding policy control of bandwidth, priority and QoS, and differentiates the service. ME60 provides realtime bandwidth monitoring and traffic evacuation for any service of any user to ensure that the operator provides quality assured services to telecommunications users once they are provisioned.

With this solution, broadband network services and resources interact with each other virtuously, which avoids the unchained consumption of resources due to the early best effort transmission. The QoS in the whole network is thus guaranteed and telecommunication users will have good experience when using the broadband network.

To sum up, in the solution of IP multi-service bearer and operation, the MSCG is playing an unsubstitutable role to push the progress of All-IP deployment. Its importance lies in promoting the transformation and profitability of operator services. In this sense, MSCG can be regarded as the engine of All-IP multi-service operation.

I have been telling IT professionals for quite some time that I believe the best way to provide applications to users is through a terminal server. The terminal services make it possible to run applications on machines that never would have otherwise supported them. For instance, I frequently administer my servers by remotely controlling them from a PDA that’s running Windows CE. Normally, Windows CE would be incapable of running User Manager for Domains or any of the other administrative tools. However, because the applications are actually running on the server itself, my PDA makes an excellent administration tool.

Nonetheless, for all their good points the terminal services don’t do well in one area of IT administration. Until recently it has traditionally been a very poor solution for supporting remote users. Let’s look at reasons why the terminal services do not make the best remote admin tool and a way to overcome these limitations.

Limitations of the terminal services for remote users

The terminal services work by sending screen images to the user and by sending a user’s keystrokes and mouse motions back to the server. These transmissions have traditionally consumed much more bandwidth than a remote connection would support. I have personally witnessed users remotely accessing a terminal server over a modem, and the entire session could be best described as painfully slow.

Another reason why the terminal services have been traditionally bad for remote users is because of the way that the user has been forced to access the terminal services. Normally, if a user will be accessing the terminal services they will dial into a RAS server, authenticate into the network, and then begin a terminal session. Again, the concept of dialing in just isn’t conducive to a well-performing terminal session.

Everything changes with Windows Server 2003

Recently there have been two changes that make the terminal services better suited to remote operations. These include the widespread deployment of broadband connections, and the implementation of Windows Server 2003. Windows Server 2003’s version of the terminal services relies on the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). This is the same protocol used by Windows XP’s Remote Assistance feature. RDP is designed to be much faster than its predecessor. It also allows for greater color depth than was previously available and supports the transmission of sound.

Since broadband Internet access and the RDP make terminal service access more feasible for remote users, it might be tempting to give all of your remote users terminal server access. However, one big challenge that must be overcome is most companies have a limited supply of IP addresses.

NAT problems

Normally, when a company gets Internet access, the ISP will provide them with one IP address. Since each PC must have its own IP address, it has become common to assign each PC a bogus IP address. The one real IP address is assigned to the router or firewall that is physically connected to the Internet. This machine uses what’s known as a Network Address Translation (NAT) firewall. NAT allows you to create an entire network of bogus IP addresses. When someone needs to access the Internet, the request is sent to the NAT firewall and it makes the request to the Web site on behalf of the person. In doing so, the request appears to have come from the network’s one legitimate IP address. When the Web site replies to the request, the reply is sent to the NAT firewall. The NAT firewall receives the request and then forwards it to the appropriate bogus IP address on the private network.

When it comes to accessing the Terminal Services, NAT presents a couple of problems. One problem is that the terminal server does not have a legitimate IP address. Therefore, the server is not accessible to the outside world. Only PCs on the private, internal network are usually able to access such servers. The second challenge is NAT is configured to block all unauthorized traffic types. This includes terminal server traffic.

Port forwarding

Just because there are challenges involved in accessing the terminal services across a NAT firewall doesn’t mean doing so is impossible. You can access a terminal server externally by using something called port forwarding. The basic idea of port forwarding is that someone from the outside world would configure her terminal server client to connect to the terminal server. However, the connection must be made by entering your network’s one legitimate IP address. Remember that this IP address is assigned to your firewall / router rather than to the terminal server. The trick is to know that the terminal services use port number 3389. Therefore, when connecting, enter the network’s one legitimate IP address followed by a colon and the number 3389 (for example, 147.100.100.1:3389).

In addition, the NAT firewall must be configured to support port forwarding by telling NAT that any traffic coming in on port 3389 must be redirected to your terminal server. For this step you can enter the server’s private IP address. The actual port forwarding mapping procedure varies from firewall to firewall, but in general it simply involves entering the port number (3389) and the private IP address of the terminal server.

Simple registry tweak

The down side to using port forwarding is that you can only access one terminal server from the outside world. The reason is that you can only map a port number to one private IP address. Therefore, if port 3389 is mapped to one terminal server, then it can’t be mapped to a second terminal server. However, there is no reason why you can’t map port number 3390 to your second terminal server. The only trick is that you must configure the second server’s terminal services to listen on port number 3390 rather than 3389.