Desktop computer rental

Laptop Lane is turning travel downtime into productive work time by renting full-service workstations to customers faced with long airport stays.

Currently available in six major U.S. airports, Laptop Lane's service centers are private offices equipped with desktop PCs, laser printers, fax machines, modems for laptop plug-in, multiple phone lines and multiline phones for conference calling, said Wendy Boehm, vice president of marketing for Laptop Lane.

A traveler with or several hours or even 15 minutes of downtime can rent an office to send or receive faxes, make phone calls, get on the Internet and check e-mail or just have a quiet place to work, Boehm said.

Each service center is equipped with between five and 16 private suites, depending on space. The six airports with this service have full-sized business centers, and some feature smaller units that are closer to the airlinegates, Boehm added.

Laptop Lane eventually plans to build between six and eight centers in each airport that it enters and will have at least one center in each of the country's 12 major airports by the end of the year.

Operation hours vary between airports, but offices are open up to 16 hours a day, seven days a week. They are staffed by cyber concierges, standing by to provide a helping hand, and are rented at a rate of $2 for the first five minutes and 38cents for each additional minute. The flat rate includes domestic and long-distance calling, faxing, printing and Internet usage. Additional services, such as copying, international calling, scanning and over-night shipping are available for an extra charge.

"We are just trying to be a full-service communication center for business travelers," Boehm said.

Laptop Lanes' offering is made possible through the use of Vertical Networks' InstantOffice system - an integrated communications platform built from the ground up, said Matt Howard, director of business development for Vertical Networks.

Vertical's all-in-one box combines seven or eight separate pieces of equipment that normally would be needed to offer the scope of service that Laptop Lane offers, Howard said.

Vertical's box integrates voice and data, accommodating telephones, PCs and other LAN or telephony devices. It allows Laptop Lane to standardize its offices across the country and features systems that can be managed remotely, Howard said. "We give a unified dashboard to the voice and data world," he added.

Long-distance and Internet services are provided to Laptop Lane customers through AT&T, said John Kent, director of information systems for Laptop Lane. Internet access is provided through a full T-1 line in heavy-traffic areas, such as Atlanta, Chicago and Cincinnati. In other places, where demand is not as high, the T-1 line is split in half, Kent added.

Vertical's full-service PBX is designed for small and medium-sized offices and for multiple locations, Kent said. For example, Laptop Lane's three service centers in the Atlanta airport, which are 1700 feet apart from each other, all run off of a single box connection.

"Take one box and plug in a voice T-1 and a data T-1 or a combined T-1, and you instantly have communication to the rest of the world," Kent said. "Customers have total access to the communication, just as they would or better than back in their own office," he added.

Other carriers are finding uses for Vertical's InstantOffice. Bell Canada recently signed an agreement with Vertical under which the carrier will use InstantOffice to offer managed voice and data services to Fortune 1000 and 2000 companies in Canada.

Vertical also has a distribution relationship with Telecom Italia and a marketing relationship with AT&T, Howard said.