By Vivek Bhatia

The next time you run out of hard disk space on your PC, calculate how much memory remains unused on the other pcs in your office. And when your machine slows down under the load of recalculating that humongous Excel spreadsheet, see how many PCs are idly wasting the processing power of their CPUs. Now, the sub-optimal network situation that I have just described is one of the many that are meant to be solved by your server. In this case, by concentrating the storage space and the CPU's power in one place so that it can be assigned on demand.

Solutions are never as simple when it comes to allocating resources for the Net. When you browse the Net through your modem, and run out of bandwidth, you will not be able to share your colleagues' idle modems. Yes, I know, I can take a leased line, and distribute the connectivity around a Local Area Network (LAN), but with the Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL) charging an astounding Rs 12 lakh a year for the privilege, few corporates can justify the cost in these times.

There could be one remedy though. By using a nifty gadget called the WebRamp m3 from Powertel Boca (www.powertelindia.com), you can actually share the bandwidth of upto three modems on a lan. And the best part is that you can bundle them in such a way that a single user can enjoy the whopping 90 kbps that three 28.8 modems can deliver--all for just Rs 49,000.

The WebRamp is a simple, but innovative idea that has been well executed. The gadget has sockets to link up as many as four PCs through their network cards. Alternatively, it can be connected through one of the sockets to a port on the switch--or hub--around which your office LAN is built. It also has three sockets into which you can plug in three modems, which can be of any speed that your Internet Service Provider can connect you at. The real magic begins when the bandwidth starts running short--either because too many users are browsing, or because one user has hit a bandwidth-intensive site.

When bandwidth usage climbs to within 90 per cent of one modem's peak capacity for a continuous period of 10 seconds, the WebRamp fires up another modem, and establishes a second connection to the Net. Conversely, to conserve on-line time, the WebRamp automatically logs out from some, or all, of the lines when the bandwidth requirement drops. WebRamp has adequate built-in security--for example, access can be limited to a specific number of PCs on the LAN--if your corporate policy limits Net access to specific individuals. And the device also functions as a four-port hub around which a four-machine LAN can be set up--ideal for a two-PC family.

But WebRamp's bandwidth bundling feature--which enables a single user to get more bandwidth than allowed by a single modem--comes with a few caveats. Since a file can be downloaded from the Net only through one connection, bandwidth bundling does not work with software downloads, or with video or audio streams. It works well if, while browsing the Web, you hit a page which has several graphics. WebRamp downloads the individual files that make up this page over separate connections, effectively giving you a throughput of around 86 kbps from all three modems.

If a large number of users on a LAN are willing to put up with slow browsing by sharing the bandwidth of a single modem, there are software-only solutions too. One such, Winproxy (www. lanprojekt.cz/winproxy) has been used by BT for two years. An inexpensive software package, Winproxy can be run on any machine that has a Net connection. Which then acts as a kind of a gateway to the Net, and provides access to all the other PCs on the LAN. Another such software is Wingate (www. wingate.net), which has similar functionality, but offers slightly better security than Winproxy.

Interestingly, Microsoft's soon-to-be-released Windows 98 includes a technology called Multilink Channel Aggregation, which can bundle bandwidths for a single PC--not a LAN--to which two modems can be connected. But Windows 98 won't see the light of day for many months, and even then, the technology will work only if your Internet Service Provider runs Windows NT 5.0 Server--which itself won't see the light of day for another year. But the WebRamp is here, now--and it works.