We recently had a client have their cable provider drop connection for a few hours one day. It wasn't the first time. Depending on many circumstances, it can be common problem that internet goes down, which can be a major cost of downtime for any business, especially one that runs their VoIP phones and has cloud servers/services. Although most national cable providers offer a business-class internet service, most of them are on their residential network. Hence the affordable price tag, compared to a carrier class internet connection like a T1 which come with a (SLA) Service level agreement. This means guaranteed uptime, and we can talk about at another time. A simple approach to having uptime, especially when your main internet connection can go offline at the worst unexpected time, is to setup a 2nd internet connection. This does not mean if you have a cable connection through Spectrum to purchase a 2nd internet from Spectrum, because if there is an outage in the area I can certainly bet it will affect both connections. Instead look for a 2nd provider from the phone company for example, like a simple DSL internet connection for backup. This will be your backup connection and sometime to failover to. It would be a hassle to disconnect your main connection and plug in a 2nd internet connection. Instead their are main routers that accept 2 internet connections, specifically known as dual WAN. For this client a PepLink balance 20 fit the bill, and was simple to setup. The router has some smarts and uses both active connections called "load balancing". This is better than failover as sometimes your primary connection will be degraded, not completely offline and the router will NOT know to failover automatically. Whereas load balancing
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