Private Connections

Another popular use for routers is connecting two offices together with a private T1 using a virtual private network (VPN). While VPNs are increasing in popularity, they cannot provide the broad, dedicated interoffice bandwidth that many companies require. A VPN adds additional overhead to the traffic between offices and also increases the circuit utilization. If you're editing a document on a workstation on one side of the VPN and someone else in the office starts downloading an ISO image from the Internet, your access to the document server may slow to the point of being unbearable. A dedicated connection, on the other hand, doesn't fight for the same resources as your Internet connection.

Figure 4-1 shows a typical private ...

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