Internet connectivity is mission-critical for most companies. Even a minute of downtime can have a material impact on revenue. Large organizations have extremely expensive infrastructure and a full-time engineering staff to keep their networks up. Most of the mid-sized companies we work with in New York City don’t have the luxury of spending millions of dollars on networking.
Without resorting to expensive dedicated internet lines, most NYC companies are at the mercy of a few ISPs. Time Warner, Verizon, and RCN provide most of the connectivity to homes and businesses in Manhattan. Many offices have complained to us about Time Warner outages. Some offices use Verizon DSL as a backup to Time Warner. When one ISP goes down, switching over to the backup ISP results in significant downtime as Macs or routers are reconfigured. This situation is easily remedied using relatively inexpensive networking gear that’s designed to serve small to mid-sized businesses.
MacMaven Consulting supports the Balance line of multi-WAN routers from Peplink. These routers connect to two or more ISPs at the same time and do something wonderful. The Peplink will distribute (i.e. load balance) your outbound internet traffic across your ISPs. Let’s say your office has a 15 Mbps connection with Time Warner and a 3 Mbps DSL line from Verizon. With a Peplink router, the Macs in your office will be able to use an aggregate 18 Mbps of bandwidth. Should one of the ISPs have an outage, the Peplink will automatically detect this and only use the ISP that’s working. When the ISP comes back online, the Peplink will resume using it. With a multi-WAN router, your internet outages last a few seconds, as long as you have at least one functional ISP connection.