looking for your networking/VPN expertise

this Summer, the school division I work with is planning some overhaul of the network. At the moment there are 16 schools and one board office covering a rather large area. 14 schools have dsl while the other two have dial up. the board office is moving this summer and with the move are putting in a wireless high speed solution that will give the non-dsl schools high speed access as well. They would like to use this to create a WAN VPN for the whole school division and my question is what kind of equipment/cost would I be looking at? Cisco switches at each demarc? routers as a firewall? Not sure if it makes a difference but the schools are running a variety of servers, win2k, win 2003, novell 5, novell 6.5 and there are even some win98 (some the majority in a few schools). I know this may be a lot to digest but any help would be greatly appreciated.

The cheap way is something like a Cisco 871 router at each site, maintaining a VPN tunnel to each other site (and applying whatever border firewalling is necessary). Total cost should be under US$12,000 at list prices I think. Not sure about other manufacturers' equipment.

The thing you probably need to be careful of is the router CPUs -- encryption is expensive, and any given router will have a limit of about x Mbps of encrypted traffic. You need to make sure that you're aware of that limit, and that it's either faster than the links or an acceptable bottleneck.

It might be worth contacting local major ISPs to see if they can provide a managed service or something as an alternative. We're starting to do that at work -- the ISP is responsible for everything up to and including the border router at each site, then we just plug in. Individual site connections range from ISDN to fibre.

Thanks for the info Tuttle. We only have one major ISP in the area and their DSL service is 3-5mb/sec for the business lines we use. they have no competition so are slow to push outside to smaller communities. The wireless will be fed off of their DSL lines. At least that is the plan for the moment. Not sure if they offer any management services but is something I will ask about.

The telcos have divisions to help you too. My Dad set this kind of stuff up everyday when he worked for SBC. Call AT&T and they could send someone out to give you a quote no charge.

Unfortunately Professor I live In Canada and the only telco anywhere near me is MTS which has a monopoly and whose customer service isn't too friendly. Right now I am gathering info to present to the school board then we will see where the cookie crumbles.

Dude, sorry, I didn't see your location. Best wishes for your networking plans. My advice, avoid committees whenever possible! :)