Does two fibre connections give you decent redundancy?

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Wadec

17 posts

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#208578 17-Feb-2017 19:33

Excuse my ignorance here.

Our business requires high internet up-time. It is annoying if we lose connectivity.

We have one fibre connection with My Republic and then another connection with Spark.

Am i right in thinking that this gives us ok redundancy? as if Spark goes down due to an issue at their end, the My Republic connection should still be ok.

I guess where we don't get redundancy is if the fibre itself coming into the building is damaged as then both connections would go down? is that right?

If we wanted to improve on this - any ideas?

Thanks for your help!

Flickky

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#1721989 17-Feb-2017 19:43

Another redundancy would be to have wireless broadband as a backup to mitigate the risk of having a fibre cut in your area (as you mentioned in the OP). No ISP offers wireless unlimited plans afaik but I guess it depends on the needs/nature of your business too.

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timmmay

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#1721996 17-Feb-2017 20:17

You're vulnerable to many physical outages between your computers and wherever the fibers for the two providers diverge. You're really only protecting against account and rare ISP issues. You should have another completely separate medium, wireless like Flickky said.

I assume you have things like redundant routers, spares for everything critical, UPS and generators? Without them you're probably more vulnerable than you are with a single internet connection.

Can you host whatever you need either in a data center or the public cloud? AWS redundancy is amazing - you can reasonably easily fail over to other data centers, with quite a bit of preparation though.

Talkiet

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#1722007 17-Feb-2017 21:07

No. It gives you a little bit of redundancy. Get VDSL if you can for redundancy - that will help more, especially if you are in a non-Chorus Fibre area.

Cheers - N

Please note all comments are the product of my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

michaeln

221 posts

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#1722507 18-Feb-2017 23:38

Let's start by quantifying "High: what is your target availability? 99%, 99.9%, 99.99%, ...

To put it another way, what's the maximum amount of time you can accept being offline? 2 days; 1 day; 8 hours; ...

Do you need connectivity 24x7---or 8am-6pm daily, five days a week?

To further refine this, assign a cost per minute for being offline. That's the amount you can afford to pay for higher availability.

99.999% ('five nines') is about 5 minutes downtime a year. Your ISP will almost certainly be able to provide this level of availability, but at an eye-watering cost. (Dual fibre feeds, into seperate sides of your building, with no common points of failure all the way back into the network and beyond). If you baulk at the cost, then you don't need five nines. There are NZ companies that do need it, and pay for it.

Assuming perfect connectivity, what's the availability of your internal system? If it's only 99% then you really don't need anything better than a single fibre, which has better than 99.5% availability, typically.

antoniosk

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#1722540 19-Feb-2017 09:44

Wadec:

Excuse my ignorance here.

Our business requires high internet up-time. It is annoying if we lose connectivity.

We have one fibre connection with My Republic and then another connection with Spark.

Am i right in thinking that this gives us ok redundancy? as if Spark goes down due to an issue at their end, the My Republic connection should still be ok.

I guess where we don't get redundancy is if the fibre itself coming into the building is damaged as then both connections would go down? is that right?

If we wanted to improve on this - any ideas?

Thanks for your help!

So, your requirement is for a resilient internet connection so if one link fails, the other steps in and keeps things running.

Resilience is one of those tricky things, as it normally means a minimum of 2 of everything (think router, power supply, power feeds, patch connections, ONT's and on and on).

With 2 fibres you have heaps of resilience in the provider network. Heaps. If someone with a digger goes through the conduit leading to the property... well....

Otherwise, get a decent router with high grade power supplies - a cisco of some sort I think - and a support person for spare parts should something break, and to help you with the configuration so you isolate WAN changes from LAN side.

If your requirements are more complex - then a forum like this isn't the best place to get advice upon which to depend for your revenue :-)

________

Antonios K

quickymart

5152 posts

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#1722686 19-Feb-2017 15:03

What about a router with a 3G or 4G backup option via a T-Stick/Vodem (or similar)?

richms

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#1722687 19-Feb-2017 15:08

Similar to that, I have 2 VDSL connections at home. Both use the same lead in, same cabinet, different telcos.

Most outages seem to have affected both connections other than the widely publicised ISP meltdowns. Middle of the night both dropping for maintanance that noone bothered to notify, although bigpipe were good at notification on a couple of occasions when they have been doing things, so those dont really count as outages.

Richard rich.ms

Hammerer

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#1722711 19-Feb-2017 16:23

Wadec:

Our business requires high internet up-time. It is annoying if we lose connectivity.

The other replies have covered the bases but I can't resist a couple of observations.

Your business case for high-availability won't be very good if it is only to avoid the annoyance of losing the Internet.

What service level is in your current contract? Your fibre connection will already be a high uptime connection. As @richms points out, most down-time will be due to maintenance and network upgrades rather than network failures. My grown up children play online games late into the night so they get hit by those sort of outages but most us won't even notice except unless we are working really late or at weekends.

Do you have servers at your site that need 24x7 Internet connectivity? Unless you are a large enough business to support the cost of providing full redundancy then I'd suggest, as @timmay pointed out, moving them to a data center which already has the redundancy or using cloud services.

deadlyllama

988 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1722715 19-Feb-2017 16:31

Wadec:
Excuse my ignorance here.

Our business requires high internet up-time. It is annoying if we lose connectivity.

We have one fibre connection with My Republic and then another connection with Spark.

Am i right in thinking that this gives us ok redundancy? as if Spark goes down due to an issue at their end, the My Republic connection should still be ok.

I guess where we don't get redundancy is if the fibre itself coming into the building is damaged as then both connections would go down? is that right?

If we wanted to improve on this - any ideas?

Thanks for your help!

Hi Wade,

You want to avoid the backup connection sharing infrastructure with the primary. Two fibre connections, unless you request some sort of diversity, will go down the same conduit. Worst case, they will share the same OLT and ONT.

You're in Whanganui if you're who I think you are.. I'm happy to answer questions like this over coffee

If you want something really independent for the secondary connection, get satellite or maybe an Inspire Net wireless connection. MyRepublic used to have only one physical fibre into Whanganui, which developed a fault a year or so ago and gave them a day long outage. Hopefully they're better now...

deadlyllama

988 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1722716 19-Feb-2017 16:35

I'm also reminded that Inspire Net have their own physical fibre network in Whanganui. I'd suggest giving them a call, if it runs past your building that's an excellent option for redundancy.

ZollyMonsta

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#1722781 19-Feb-2017 19:44

Get yourself a Unifi router also and have auto-switching redundancy. :)

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chevrolux

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#1722786 19-Feb-2017 20:18

We've done Fibre/DSL set ups a few times and that seems to work very well and you are still in a business budget. One that comes to mind especially was a while back last year in Christchurch when Enable had a massive outage. Chorus DSL services were functioning just fine =)

The way we do it is auto-failover with a Mikrotik router so yea the router could die and you are out. The nice thing being if the concern was really real, Mikrotik is cheap enough to have a spare all configured and sitting there ready to just be swapped out.

hio77

'That VDSL Cat'
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Spark

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#1722811 19-Feb-2017 21:13

chevrolux:

The nice thing being if the concern was really real, Mikrotik is cheap enough to have a spare all configured and sitting there ready to just be swapped out.

now if only everyone had spare modems at their business for cases like this!

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