• February 9, 2021
• By Dan Garbarz
• In Path Diversity
• No Comment
• 6

Let’s face it, when your Internet is down, your business is down. With more and more businesses moving their critical applications to the Cloud, it is imperative to consider multiple Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to secure access to your essential corporate data and applications. It makes even more sense to ensure that these ISPs are diverse for true redundancy and disaster avoidance.

Often times when businesses, or even network service providers, discuss disaster recovery and business continuity planning, they use the terms ‘diversity’ and ‘redundancy’ interchangeably.

But in reality, they are two very different things.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) defines both terms:

• Redundancy – having two independent means of connecting to the Internet.
• Diversity – having two independent Internet connections that route between the same two locations without sharing any common points.

Here are three things to consider for truly diverse internet redundancy. Review these to guarantee that your ISPs are disparate and are not subject to the same elements that could cause simultaneous outages of both networks:

1. Diverse Building Entrance– Most providers leverage underground cabling and fiber facilities to enter buildings. Whether your provider is reselling the phone company’s access to the building, 9 times out of 10 they are using the same conduit from the street to the basement of the building. If this entrance is compromised, both ISPs can suffer the same fate.
2. Diverse Path– Telecom is an incestuous business and fiber providers often lease access from one another. In addition, it’s very difficult to ascertain the underground routes that these fiber links take in the last mile. So how do you know if the providers traverse different routes underground?
3. Diverse Internal Wiring– Some common outages are caused by cables that are cut or destroyed within the building itself. Fiber providers are collocated in the basement and share the same route as all other providers that pull cable upwards to the customer’s suite.
4. Diverse Global Interconnects – It’s best to have an ISP that uses more than one or two Internet Interconnects.  Some might be AT&T, Equinix, Level3, and Zayo.

I think you see the common theme here

A Viable Alternative

Consider high speed wireless access as the only truly diverse alternative to fiber. There are hundreds of fiber service providers, but only a few last mile providers. Whether you use the big phone company, the cable provider, or your provider was fortunate enough to build its own building entrance, 90% of all buried infrastructure share the same facilities. Even for the few they have their own conduit, fiber, and cabling systems, certainly all of them share the terrain.

Fixed Wireless is the only answer to a diverse path from your corporate network to the Internet backbone for ultimate redundancy. By establishing Line of Sight (LOS) from the rooftop of your building to the rooftop of an Internet Backbone Gateway, BelWave delivers business class Internet at Gigabit speeds that avoids all other cabling systems. The roof offers a highly diverse building entrance; air transport as a medium allows for a completely diverse path in the last mile; and because all wiring is extended from the roof downward to the customer suite, your service will not share the same inside wiring path as your fiber access.

Disaster Avoidance for Cloud Connectivity

• Avoid Water Main Breaks
• Avoid Manhole Disasters
• Avoid Fiber Cuts
• Avoid Internal Cable cuts
• Avoid Downtime

Ready to get faster Internet than ever before and get truly diverse internet redundancy? Contact us today.