Amuse us for a few minutes and tap into your imagination:
Your network just went down. Now, you’re in a meeting with a room full of people who can’t remember their own email passwords, much less understand how much work it takes to keep a network up.
The general theme of this meeting is something like, “As a company, we can’t afford for our network to go down…ever!”
Sounds like you have a fun new project on your hands.
The most obvious step to take in a scenario like this is to make sure you have a redundant network connection so that if one connection goes down, you can simply fail over to the other one. This makes sense and sounds easy enough.
(After all, between the private applications in your data center and the applications your employees leverage via the internet, productivity drops exponentially when the network goes down.)
With this in mind, you ask yourself what some of the most common things that can make the first network go down are, and whether or not those would affect the secondary network, which would in return, render the whole project useless.
Great question.
Of course there are carrier outages, but those tend to not be that common. So this probably isn’t where you’re feeling pain. A more common occurrence would be a construction project having a backhoe go rogue and rip up some fiber that’s very valuable to you.
In fact, 90% of outages happen in the last-mile, so why not explore redundancy options with a wireless last mile?
4G Backup Solutions
The 4G network has reach a level of reliability and ubiquity that it can be very successfully leveraged by businesses for a multitude of purposes.
The real beauty to this solution, from a backup standpoint, is that unless you’re using 4G as a primary network (which can be done with great success) then it will always provide a truly diverse entry as a secondary connection. No buildout cost, a low monthly price (metered, of course, so know your needs), and these connections can be monitored and managed remotely so that you can sleep easy knowing somebody else is keeping an eye on it for you.
While some critics cite fears of reliability, speed, and packet loss on 4G networks, those who’ve used business-class routers know that 4G can bring surprising speed and great up-time—all at a low price point when compared to a fiber connection or bundle of T1’s.
Round-the-clock monitoring also ensures that you fail back to your primary as soon as the option is available so that the metered costs of 4G doesn’t get out of control because you never went back to your primary when it came back online.
Recap
Okay, so let’s recap:
- You need a network that’s up always according to your team of IT “gurus.”
- Wired connections are pricey and rarely provide a diverse entry, making them vulnerable to the same problems that put your primary out of order in the first place.
- 4G is the real deal when it comes to speed and reliability, and Joe Backhoe hasn’t found a way to take out fiber and 4G in the same accident yet.
- When it comes to bang for your buck, you can take 4G all the way to the bank as long as you are failing back to your primary when it becomes available to ensure you don’t fly through data.
Any questions? If so, give us a ring. At Wired Networks, we’re your secret weapon for a more reliable network and 99.99% network uptime. Contact us today to find out how we do it.
