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The Essential Argument For Redundant WAN Connection

When a business, including a small office or a home office, can afford to be offline for minutes throughout the day or hours through the year then redundancy in their internet connectivity and failover ISP issues are not a consideration.

However, this simply isn't the case for most businesses today, with small business and home businesses often very heavily reliant on the internet and on solid and uninterrupted internet connectivity. When this is the case, we need to talk about the status of your current redundant WAN connection.

WAN Basics

A WAN or a wide area network includes both your own interconnected computers as well as those over a geographic distance. It also includes the circuits and systems of your ISP, which is something you have no control or influence over.

While most providers will have 99.99% SLA terms in your contract, you need to think about those approximately 2 or so hours a year when you don't have any internet service.

Most people assume that they can live without a couple of hours a year of internet connectivity, but keep in mind this can happen at any time, and in small blocks. It doesn't always happen at three in the morning when you aren't online.

In some cases, when there is a constant issue with packet loss, essential data may be dropped, customers and sales staff may not be able to access cloud-based applications. This can lead to losing customers, business, and credibility, and you may or may not be aware of the problem.

In addition, just because the SLA is 99.99% uptime doesn't mean things can't happen. Top ISPs have been down in the past, and while they may attempt to make it up to their clients, there will be an impact on your business.

Redundancy to the Rescue

With a redundant WAN connection, there are two, or up to five, possible connections to the internet. Our systems can accept all ISPs from fiber optics to DSL, and they can be bonded to actually provide you better service and speeds on a continual basis.

In this respect, you are not paying for one service that you aren't using. Even for a small business the boost in speed and productivity through our bonding and TCP optimization will help to defer the costs of the second connection. You can opt to have your best connection, such as fiber optics paired with a lower cost broadband connection to reduce the cost of your redundant WAN connection.

If one or the other should fail, you will still have full internet connectivity. In addition, you will still be able to take advantage of additional speed and bandwidth, something definitely worth considering.