Are you better off with the simplicity of a single carrier WAN with one throat to choke and a single set of support and escalations, or are you better served juggling multiple carriers and managing all the chaos that comes with having multiple WAN vendors?
This subject seems to have become more popular lately, given some very large and lengthy outages that have occurred on some service providers networks involving BGP and route table sizes.
It has become quite common these days for carriers to swear on a stack of bibles that they can’t have a core melt (which is a fancy term for their whole network going down).
Here at Wired Networks, we think we’ve seen just about every single major carrier experience this phenomenon.
So how often does it happen, and should it truly be a concern?
Our experience dictates that about every 5-7 years each carrier runs into this issue. It should always be a concern, but you have to weigh other factors to determine how much of a concern it really is.
Some of the factors and questions that should be considered and addressed are the impact of downtime:
- Do you have a backup network on another carrier? (A backup network on the same carrier will yield twice the headache when you get bit by this bug)
- Is your primary network made up of multiple carriers, and is it worth the hassle of managing multiple carrier relationships?
- If any single carrier goes down, how many sites will be affected and what is your contingency plan?
If you have a low threshold for downtime, then being tied to a single carrier can be catastrophic to your business’ productivity and profits. Managing multiple carriers can make sure that a single carrier’s core melt won’t turn your users into overpaid paper-weights.
Get ready to strap in and deal with multiple carriers, or find a partner who is in a position to do so for you.
At Wired Networks, we will walk you through the many different scenarios, and provide you with multiple options to keep your business up and running when one of your service providers isn’t. We have strategies to fit every pocketbook, and in some cases you can have your cake and eat it too (aka, pay less than your current solution and have a backup solution).
Knowledge is power, and it doesn’t cost anything to reach out and ask.
Wired Networks offers a full array of managed SD wan solutions. Contact us today to see how we can help your business.
