Broadband provider

[Guest Guest]

I've placed our order for a Leased line via Wave9 today, but have chosen not to take a back up line with them. I'd like to use another provider for this to remove the single point of failure.

 

Would you recommend any providers? We're only a small special school so I'm wanting to go with VDSL

 

I'm tempted to go with Zen as I've got them personally and never had an issue

 

Thanks

[Roberto]

Are you sure that a geographically dispersed line to a different point of presence is possible in your location? It’s arguably the main benefit of a separate line from another provider.

[Guest Guest]

Our leased line is via Virgin and VDSL Is via Openreach so I assume so.

[Edu-IT]

I believe if you take the backup line with them, they configure it in active/active, so you could be utilising it and not just having it sat there.

[Guest Guest]

I believe if you take the backup line with them, they configure it in active/active, so you could be utilising it and not just having it sat there.

That's what I plan on doing just using a line from a different provider

[slugshead]

With smoothwall you can plug both connections straight in and create a pool, had it set up with two 1gb connections for over a year and it's worked flawlessly when one has dropped

 

https://help.smoothwall.net/FilterFirewall/Content/3Network/1Configuration/3LinkLoadBalancing/LinkLoadBalancing.htm

 

My downfall here, 1gb link from smoothwall to core....

[Wave9_Lee]

I've placed our order for a Leased line via Wave9 today, but have chosen not to take a back up line with them. I'd like to use another provider for this to remove the single point of failure.

 

Would you recommend any providers? We're only a small special school so I'm wanting to go with VDSL

 

I'm tempted to go with Zen as I've got them personally and never had an issue

 

Thanks

Hi Kieran

 

We can provide you with a backup line through a different provider - this is our default offer. We provide direct internet access for all of our customers for this reason, rather than terminating all customer connections into the same datacentre. If you take a leased line and an fttc/p service, they will use different routes/ducts, terminate in different locations locally, and logically will route through different ISPs. By going with us you will have the same support arrangements and a single bill. If you’re taking our managed firewall option, then we load balance the two connections as active-active so you get the use of both lines in normal use. (As well as the comfort of knowing your backup is actually live - you’d be surprised how often some providers don’t test/monitor). If at some point you were to say, run voip over the backup line, you would have resilience both ways - and simplicity when it comes to troubleshooting.

 

You’re obviously free to choose a different provider altogether, but there genuinely isn’t any benefit.

[FN-GM]

Do your public IP addresses need to failover on the backup connection? If so you need a service that supports BGP - both primary and backup need to support this.

[Wave9_Lee]

Do your public IP addresses need to failover on the backup connection? If so you need a service that supports BGP - both primary and backup need to support this.

 

This is an interesting area with a number of ways to solve it. If you're hosting services on site that need this, there is often ways of adding in alternate IP addresses as fallback, or perhaps using Dynamic DNS. In terms of resilience, I feel it's good to have alternate IP addresses, with different ISPs. Protects against ISP failure (which would take out your single IP address possibly) and also provides good protection for DDoS.

 

There are no right and wrong ways, just depends on your current environment and approach to risk (plus cost of course, as always)

[bwestlake]

Can you get FTTP?

 

Normally for our customers (Engineer at an MSP) we have a leased line as primary and then FTTP as secondary, using load balancing on the NGFW (either Meraki MX or FortiGate appliances)

[Guest Guest]

Can you get FTTP?

 

Normally for our customers (Engineer at an MSP) we have a leased line as primary and then FTTP as secondary, using load balancing on the NGFW (either Meraki MX or FortiGate appliances)

That's what we're going to do