Backup internet line

[junz]

Hi,

 

As we move more services into the cloud we are looking to have a backup line in case our leased line goes down.

 

Does anyone anything setup for this purpose which does not break the bank?

[yac2016]

FTTC line?

[thebatman]

We use FTTC and only Admin staff and Teachers use this when our main link fails.

[The_IT_Guy]

We have a backup FTTC line costs about £800 a year.

 

About a month after it was installed I had a call from our ISP saying they noticed our internet feed was down and I replied no it wasn't its working fine, without realising it had automatically switched over to the FTTC line! Would highly recommend. Glad we had it as its a good piece of mind whilst we move more to GSuite. Also that outage was a whole area one down for two days and we just carried on working.

 

We are a secondary everyone uses out FTTC line when the main one fails.

[Shadow_Walker]

Hi,

 

As we move more services into the cloud we are looking to have a backup line in case our leased line goes down.

 

Does anyone anything setup for this purpose which does not break the bank?

 

Yep we use Exa for our leased line and backup line solution. Fail over is automatic and has worked well for our trust and is our go to model now for all new internet lines.

[SchoolsBroadband]

Hi,

 

it depends what your usage profile is and what's available at the school. If no FTTC is available then you're a bit stuck. I wouldn't recommend 4G for a secondary school as you'll hammer the data usage but for a primary school it's generally ok for short periods.

 

Depending on your usage profile you may also want to look at EoFTTC instead of FTTC as it comes with guaranteed bandwidth and you can do end to end QOS which you can't properly do with FTTC. This might be needed if the FTTC / EoFTTC speeds are poor due to distance from the cabinet.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[rich_tech]

All our sites operate with fibre/adsl backup here (business though not school) exponential-e are our isp

[junz]

Hi Rich-tech,

 

I have not heard of this ISP before - How have you found them?

[AlanD]

I don’t think...if this is an emergency backup, to have the supposed guarantee of EoFTTC...

 

And I’d be looking at virgin, if you’re area is covered, because if a BT ...or rather openreach leases line went down..I wouldn’t want my backup to be from the same cabinet or exchange.

 

If you went for something like virgin business 200mb/s or 300mb/s service and fed it into a load balancing router..or, fo example something like smoothwall, you would be able to use it all the time giving a welcome boost to bandwidth.

 

You will need to think about allocation of IP addresses and SMTP and other externally advertised services to ensure if one line failed those services remained available. Perhaps they are already hosted externally, but chances are you then have vpn links to onsite school databases for sims or whatever.

[titch]

I have been thinking about this as well but figured it makes sense for the line to come into a different building (in case main building goes down /powercut etc) i can't get my head round what I would need to do in terms or routing though if I was to physically carry out firewall over to a different building! Not sure if we can justify the cost of a second firewall "just in case" . Are you guys bringing your second lines into a different building?

[rich_tech]

Hi Rich-tech,

 

I have not heard of this ISP before - How have you found them?

 

This company was already using them when I joined, we have expanded out with them further since I joined too

[DrCheese]

I've got an FTTC line as a backup, but the max we can get is 30mb in our area so I would never use it for more than the basics (VOIP Phone system) - Our main link is a 1gb line over cityfibre

 

I've would look at something like Virgin for our proper backup line should we start going heavily down the cloud file storage route in future.

[Wave9_Lee]

Resilience is basically a cost vs risk vs impact calculation. With leased lines, the vast majority will have 100% up time over many years. If there is an outage with the fibre provider, this will mostly be rectified pretty quickly. There will be the odd occasion where something more fundamental happens (digger) but these are rare. So by having a leased line you are already in a good place risk-wise. If you are using cloud or data centre hosted shared filtering and firewalls, there can be issues out of your control/visibility, but these (from anecdotal evidence on here) get rectified pretty quickly. EoFttC has better fix time targets that FttC, but in both cases, faults on these are more frequent and longer lasting - even with robust SLAs, due to the lower cost of the underlying services, the penalties aren't as motivating as they could be. The next issue is capacity during an outage. If you have the ability to control your traffic, and, say, restrict usage to power users, admin, or restrict video streaming for instance, then you can still have critical functionality during an outage with lower cost backup solution (4G/FttC). The data usage on 4G shouldn't be a concern, as it should be included in your overall service, and it's quite possible to get 30-60Mbps in many areas (a survey and research of different mobile carriers should be done pre-install). If your main service is EoFttC or FttC, then a backup FttC is a good idea. It's low cost, and you can use both lines simultaneously, so as well as a backup service, you have an increase in available bandwidth.

 

Whichever route you take, you should where possible, utilise different carriers/ISPs and technologies to ensure as much separacy as you can afford. i.e. BT+Virginmedia or Fibre+Copper, Fibre/Copper + 4G. We have occasionally delivered 2xFttC + 4G as the costs are low.

 

Lastly of course, if it's all plugged into a single bit of kit at the far end, or on-site, you need to consider how much of that can be mitigated and at what cost (and what the risk actually is) MTBF figures, robust SLA for HW swaps will help here. Hopefully you can get some info about what your service provider is doing in their core if you're taking a centralised service.

 

At the end of the day if your risk analysis says that you have a higher than acceptable risk of downtime and the impact is high, you need to find some money for more resilience. The problem is that it's seen a bit like insurance - everyone resents paying for it until the insured risk occurs... and there's not a lot of money around!