In the remote access arena, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Vendors continue to increase port capacity, improve security and beef-up fault tolerance.
While buyers' options increase, however, the fundamental technology behind today's remote access devices remains largely as it was last year. From a network manager's standpoint, traditional direct-dial remote access has a lot going for it. It's familiar, it's relatively easy to implement and it uses standard communications software. The newest direct-dial remote access gear supports hundreds of users on a single chassis without the banks of individual modems and the nest of wiring we saw just a few years ago. Modems or ISDN terminal adapters built into one-box remote access concentrators process the calls.