When the offices are blocks or miles away from each other, we must rely on the phone or cable companies whose wires reach throughout the nation.  For the rest of this post I’ll refer to the phone company as this physical connection vendor.

The phone company can sell you a private circuit running from one location to another.  No other traffic travels over this connection.  It is for your sole use and can connect your remote computers. 

This is the standard approach for large corporations to connect offices.  The cost of the connection depends on the distance between the two locations and the quality of the connection; the longer the distance the more expensive the line.  Line quality determines the speed of the connection.  If you pay enough you can have a private circuit between two offices hundreds of miles apart with speeds approaching what you have when the two computers are only a few feet apart. 

You seldom see this approach with dental offices because of the cost.

A more common approach will not use a private circuit, but the public Internet to establish the computer-to-computer connection.  You pay no “distance” charges and can reach anywhere in the world where there is Internet service.  You do need to purchase a relatively fast Internet connection for both offices. 

Here is a link to the business connection offerings from Comcast:  http://business.comcast.com/smb/services/internet/plans as an example speeds and costs.

Once you have the Internet connection on both sides you have a choice on the protocol.  Remember “protocol” from last week’s post.  The choices use a technique called “tunneling”.  It creates a private tunnel through the public Internet between the two computers. 

This assures you that the conversation between the two computers will be private and cannot be monitored by an outside entity.  You can do this by creating a virtual private network (VPN – don’t you just love three-letter acronyms) or by using a Microsoft® tool called Remote Desktop Services (this is sometimes called Terminal Services). 

The application you are running on the remote computer may dictate which of these is best to use.  Most dental offices that I’ve encountered use Remote Desktop Services running over the Internet.  The cost is reasonable and the performance is good.

There are choices to be made when connecting remote dental office computers and consulting a networking professional would be right click that could ultimately save you significant money and/or the heart-ache of too slow a connection.

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