Home » Q&A with Kris Maher: Why Every Business Needs a Redundant Internet Connection
Whether you’re a small business owner or managing the operations of a large corporation, understanding the nuances of internet redundancy could save you from significant losses in productivity and revenue.
From real-time communications and cloud-based applications to customer transactions and remote work capabilities, a reliable internet connection is not just a convenience for a business — it’s a necessity. However, even the most reliable internet services can face unexpected interruptions, making internet redundancy an essential safeguard for any business that values continuity and productivity.
In this Q&A session, Kris Maher, Vice President of Sales for EarthLink Business, draws on over a decade of industry experience to explain the importance of backup internet solutions. Maher, a passionate advocate for robust connectivity solutions, leads the EarthLink Business sales teams, ensuring businesses across our network stay connected.
Join us as Maher discusses why even the most reliable internet connections can benefit from a backup, what options are best suited for different business needs, and how having a secondary internet circuit can be as crucial as an insurance policy against unforeseen downtime.
Let’s dive into the essentials with Kris Maher.
Maher: Some businesses need backup internet service because with only one circuit, you have the chance of downtime. If you have a fiber or broadband circuit, in most of the markets we’re in, there’s a lot of construction going on. There’s a chance for somebody digging up the street to pull up the cable that’s in the ground.
And with so many customers and businesses having offsite storage and data centers that they need to access from that business, any kind of downtime can either stop production, stop shipping, or stop transactions going on.
Having a secondary circuit, even if it’s an inexpensive one, like a 4G or 5G broadband circuit, or even fixed wireless are great options to mitigate the costs of any kind of downtime.
Maher: Assuming most people have a fiber or cable-style circuit, in most buildings those services are all coming in on the same conduit into the building. So, from our standpoint, we like a diverse and redundant circuit – either dedicated fixed wireless, or a 4G/5G solution.
With those options, you’re getting alternate access into the building and further uptime with that diversity.
Maher: Most businesses, if they have downtime, lose productivity. Your people are sitting around, you’re not producing what you’re supposed to be producing.
It’s common for people to say for every hour of downtime, it costs them XYZ amount of dollars. So having a secondary circuit is almost like an insurance policy for downtime on that circuit. For a couple $100 or less, you’re protecting and covering that main circuit.
I would say there’s really no big disadvantage to having a backup. The biggest complaint or pushback we get from customers is that they don’t want to spend a couple of $100 a month for the potential of being down maybe once or twice a year or even less.
Unfortunately, the longer they’ve gone without an outage, the less likely they are to have a backup, right? Inevitably, every carrier is going to have an issue at some point. So, even if it’s been a year or two, it’s worth having that circuit.
Maher: We have a lot of healthcare clients who need 100% uptime like hospitals. We have a lot of schools. And then we also have a lot of manufacturing companies that have off-site software that they can’t be without. So, those are three of the many industries we work with.
Maher: I think the biggest reason is you never know when a fiber cut could happen. It’s almost inevitable in any of the markets that we serve. There’s growth and building construction all around, even in rural areas. So, it’s not a matter of if it’s going to happen, but when you’re going to have an outage. At that point, you’re going to really regret not having a backup circuit.
Maher: It’s becoming more common in the past couple of years with SD WAN – or hardware and software that can take a second circuit and blend it in with the first one seamlessly. In the past you had to have expensive equipment to do that.
With SD WAN, it’s becoming more prevalent, and with the price of broadband and cable, and even dedicated fixed wireless coming down, year-over-year, more people are adopting it.
Maher: I think if it’s available, dedicated fixed wireless is the best compared to a 4G or 5G solution, which has data caps. The problem is dedicated fixed wireless is not necessarily available in every area.
For 5G, there’s a lot of buildings and structures where the signal can’t get through wherever you have your device. I like dedicated fixed wireless, because it’s installed on the roof and then cabled in and down to your telco closet, and you’re getting a dedicated speed. You’re getting a service level agreement that you don’t get with for 5G or even broadband and a lot of the cable products.
Maher: When the customer authorizes us to move forward, we schedule with them and their IT team to ensure it’s a seamless installation.
We’ll go out to the customer site and put non-penetrating mounts on the roof so it doesn’t void the roof manufacturer’s warranty, and then we’ll use existing penetrations in the roof to drop either Cat 5 or 6 cables or even fiber down into their telco closet where we have our CPE device.
From there we just hand off the connection to the customers firewall or router, just like you would a fiber circuit. It’s essentially like fiber but coming in from a diverse and redundant path.
Maher: It’s different for each business. But ultimately, downtime costs businesses productivity, both from their employees and from what they’re producing. So, it’s going to be different for each business but to that extent, for a couple hundred dollars, you insure that connection.
Maher: I think one of the biggest things they need to look at is there are a lot of carriers that lease lines from other carriers. When you’re getting a backup circuit, you want to make sure you understand who the underlying carrier is, so that your backup isn’t working off the same carrier as your primary carrier.
You can see that a lot, using AT&T for example. You could have an AT&T primary circuit and another carrier for a diverse circuit and that backup carriers’ using AT&T. If they have an outage, you’re down.
The second is you could have diverse carriers but coming in the same conduit into your building. Sometimes that’s unavoidable but if you can and have dedicated fixed wireless available in your area, the best solution is to do one wired circuit, one dedicated fixed wireless circuit. Then you have true diversity and redundancy.
Maher: You see that a lot with some of the backup 4G/5G solutions. The bigger the primary circuit, your backup is going to have to have nearly as much capacity.
That’s why it’s good to have a dedicated, fixed wireless type of service, that can match your dedicated service, so you don’t have throttling issues. Otherwise, it’s basically a bottleneck.
If you have a large, Gig-fiber circuit, but only a 4G backup, you’re taking all that traffic and trying to jam it into a circuit too small for your traffic. So, you’re going to have VPNs drop and packet loss. That’s why I always suggest going with a dedicated fixed wireless connection at the same or near speed as your primary fiber.
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