Huffman Trucking Telecommunication Protocols

Huffman Trucking Telecommunication Protocols

Huffman Trucking specializes in custom transportation needs throughout America. After a single-site launch years ago, Huffman is now up to four hub locations and looking to expand further. Clearly, this burgeoning company remains on the right track. However, there remain areas that could benefit from better technology and thorough planning. Primarily it will be paramount for Huffman Trucking to look closely at its telecommunications, a crucial area for any business, let alone one that impacts national commerce. In today’s business clime, particularly for a market leader like Huffman, having proper communication channels among the four hubs is paramount.

When it comes to telecommunications there are two industry leaders: TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) and IPX/SPX. Huffman employs both protocols in their enterprise.

TCP/IP

Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol is, in most cases, the most common network protocol in use today. This is due, in part, because most operating systems (OS) offer native support. That isn’t to say OS integration is the only reason TCP/IP holds the lions share of data transport needs. There are other reasons of course. TCP/IP has larger packets and can offer better error control (Meyers, 2007). TCP/IP is prevalent in all four of Huffman’s branches, in one form or another. Couple TCP/IP’s relative ease of installation with its OS friendliness and you have a pretty good setup; particularly with Huffman using some near-archaic end user personal computers. Systems running Windows 95, 98, and 2000 all can use TCP/IP pretty natively вЂ" most in house network administrators should have no problem installing and maintaining this protocol. That can ease any financial strain of requiring outside vendor support.

IPX/SPX

IPX/SPX is a slightly different breed, albeit every bit as effective as TCP/IP. Novell designed IPX/SPX to run on its Novell NetWare servers primarily. The protocol is used by any recent Microsoft and Macintosh OS, but requires some tweaking. TCP/IP often senses and adjusts to things like packet size and error correcting, IPX/SPX networks often require those parameters to be manually set (Meyers, 2007).

“Novell NetWare is not