A magazine publisher based in Nairobi has branch in Kisumu, and one in Mombasa. The company has kept in touch by telephone and courier service. Each office is networked. The networks were implemented five years ago and each has a 10 Base 5 Ethernet network.
Lately, the company has been developing projects that involve teams consisting of members from more than one office. Each office has resources that others do not; the current projects require all of these resources. The network have frequent cable problems, each time they have one, the entire network goes down until the problem is resolved.
The management team would like a networking solution which would offer easier troubleshooting, less downtime, and WAN communications between sites. They would like the WAN connections to support 256 kbps of data and several telephone conversations. The combination of long distance calls and courier service should be eliminated by the WAN. Management would like the WAN to be able to continue operation even if one of the WAN links fails.