Recently, when I picked up a call to the PC Rescue 99, a support service of our company, I received an emotional appeal from an elderly customer saying, “If I cannot shop because e-mail or the Internet isn’t available, it will be a serious crisis of my survival”. As hinted by the conversation, Japan is moving towards an electronic commerce (EC) centric society. Currently in Japan, major companies such as Rakuten Market and Amazon.co.jp., and a wide range of purchase opportunities from various other EC sites are providing shipping straight to the customer’s door. Are EC sites, courier services and the Internet the only key elements of EC?
The leading support infrastructure to this growing networked society is of course centered around the Web experience. One unglamorous but important element often overlooked by the layman internet user is the physical network hardware infrastructure such as routers, switches and many, many others. Because of the rapid progress of such devices and the frequent changes in network configuration, the frequency of maintenance work is high, which is a common source of concern for persons in charge at IT departments who directly deal with these daily changes.
Especially in the maintenance of routers configuration change is frequent, so configuration information can be set and changed from a remote location. Today a lot of Japanese companies deal with overseas engineers for network setting configuration. In fact, a local technician actually goes to the site to handle the physical support work, such as connecting a laptop PC to a router, launching terminal software, tethering, unpacking the new router, installing it in the rack, connecting the power supply, as well as providing a connection environment for a remote engineer who handles the network configuration. Often it is also necessary to replace cables or upload the configuration file into the router locally. Circuit switching may be performed at the same time as router configuration, so the circuit identification can be considerably difficult depending on the work site and the circuit type. It requires experience and knowledge with a bit of teamwork.
We at Planetworks K. K. have a far reaching engineering expertise which continues to support these kinds of sites, and our engineers, who are stationed nationwide, collaborate with remote teams every day to support networking hardware like but not limited to Cisco devices. We are responsible for installing various routers, switches and Wi-Fi access points, and their required cabling. We provide English speaking engineers and extensive communication support should a bilingual be unavailable.