On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 3:19 PM, Ben Scott <[email protected]> wrote: > We have two feeds for our office. Comcast for web browsing -- it's > cheap, disposable, incoming bandwidth. And a local ISP with a > symetrical, SLA'ed feed for email and remote access.
I was asked off-list why we have multiple feeds. In a word: Robustness. Comcast gives us cheap, disposable incoming bandwidth. We use it for web browsing, downloads, software updates, and the like. None of this stuff is mission critical for us. So it won't kill us if it does down for a few hours or even a few days, or if the quality is inconsistent. We get 8 Mbit/sec incoming for $65/month this way. The local ISP gives us a fixed-wireless feed. It's 512 Kbit/sec committed and 1.5 Mbit/sec maximum, symetrical. It's consistent and reliable. No wires mean it's immune to falling trees, backhoes, and weather. The ISP is very responsive -- if I have trouble, I call in to their NOC and speak to a network engineer, not call center monkies reading from scripts. It's not a mass-market IP address so mail servers who reject everything Comcast are okay. For this we pay around $300/month. We have our email, VPN, and BlackBerry's on this, because those *are* important to us. Two totally different companies mean it's extremely unlikely for both to have trouble at once. During a big ice storm in December, when millions of people across the region where without power, Comcast was out for a week. The wireless ISP (which is relaying from their tower to a city tens of miles away) never even blinked. In the unlikely even the WISP has technical trouble (or goes out of business overnight), we can fail over to Comcast. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
