You never know when the power might go out, or a natural disaster will strike. Businesses can quickly lose productivity not being able to access Internet, even if for only a few hours. Having multiple internet providers and creating a backup for your internet can save a lot of time, money, and lost productivity.
Watch the video below as Dave Spilker explains setting up an Internet backup and why it's important.
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On June 3rd, 2020, there was a major outage of Comcast in across the United States and that's what spawned this discussion. Let’s talk about having multiple Internet providers. You can set up your firewall in such a way that it uses two different feeds from the Internet. A lot of people say well then there’s the cost to pay for the utility again. But if you get the most basic plan for a secondary Internet, something like that would likely only cost 50 to 75 bucks a month or 600 to 900 bucks a year.
What does a day cost in lost productivity for your business if there's a bad storm comes through and takes out a particular Internet carrier for an extended period of time? What would that cost you?
What you can do is have two different feeds into the same router/firewall and we can set it up so that the router is constantly pinging equipment on either side of those carriers.
This might not be something you want to try without first consulting an IT team like us as there are a few things to consider when you set up multiple carriers. If you have IP phones or an on-premise email server, settings need to be modified to ensure communication works to and from this infrastructure from either Internet provider. In this way you can protect your business from an outage and you can have multiple carriers.
You might set it up with a prepaid cellular AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile account and plug in that chip and make it so that if your primary Internet provider went down, it switched over to the secondary. These are a couple of different options we can set up with multiple feeds or multiple carriers so you don't end up with a day or two of downtime in these uncertain times.