It is amazing how quickly the Internet has become a critical part of our lives in such a small short of time. It is often easy to forget how reliant we have become on the Internet until a service interruption brings it home to us. Its like the beginning of this year when we all realised that without electricity and energy our way of life is unsustainable and therefore we had better plan to make it less vulnerable.

Cheap broadband has made Internet access more mission critical for many businesses

Whille the Internet has enabled small and medium businesses (SMEs) to compete with large multi-nationals on a global scale it has also become more critical for SME's to address Internet access as a risk factor in their business. Most small business make use of one of the many broadband options availabel to to them either  ADSL,iBurst or Vodacom 3G/HSDPA. In order to create a cheap redundant Internet connection one needs to make use of two broadband connections that are supplier by different providers.

iBurst Dual Wan Router

iBurst has a dual wan router which can take either two iBurst connections or an iBurst connection and an ADSL connection. The router can be configured to either load-balance over the two line or to fail over to the second line when the primary connection goes down. By making use of an ADSL connection as your primary Internet conneciton and then an iBurst pay-as-you-go data bundle as a backup one can create a cheap redundant Internet connection solution. Since it is envisaged that any interruption in the ADSL connectivity will be temporary the pay-as-you-go iBurst option means there is no additional monthly cost involved and cost is only incurred in the event of the ADSL lines failure. In addition since the line should only be down for a short while the costs of paying per user for your iBurst bandwidth should be limited. In the very least it will give you enough time to find a more medium term solution should the ADSL problem proof problematic.

3G/HSDPA Dual Wan Router

The only problem with using iBurst as your backup is that there may be poor reception for iBurst in the area you are located in this case you will need to consider using 3G or HSDPA as a backup solution. (iBurst is preferable as it is less exepensive). In this case use can be made of the Linksys WRT54G 3G router or the impressive Globe Surfer II 3G router. These routers can be configured in a similar manner to the iBurst dual wan router and provide much of the same functionality.

ADSL DUAL Wan Router

The cheapest option is to use a ADSL DUAL Wan router some appliance routers are available that supply this functionality though for most of our customer we simply make use of an old PC, pop Linux on the box and configure the router to provide load-balancing or redundancy which ever is preferred.

Conclusion

So in conclusion I hope that small and medium business can see that it shouldn't cost an arm and a leg to reduce the risk of lost Internet connectivity to an acceptable level.