What Are the Reasons to Have Multiple Internet Connections?
The short answer is “it depends”. Looking at it in more detail, there are various reasons you may need multiple Internet connections, namely:
Your traffic and internet application profile:
Depending on your business, your Internet users will have various applications and services that they use daily and that they depend on. Say you are a company that heavily relies on cloud based services (and who doesn’t) such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), Hosted voice and/or many other services that heavily rely on Internet connectivity. Then Internet downtime directly translates into business downtime and therefore will result in lost revenues. Unless you are a business that has minimal to no dependency on Internet uptime, you should consider having a WAN (Wide Area Network) strategy that involves multiple Internet connections. Usually the cost of having multiple Internet connections is a fraction of the value provided by the improved uptime and performance.
How mission critical are services uptime and performance:
Some applications, such as VoIP (Voice over IP), video conferencing, remote desktop, or services provided from internal servers to your clients, may be the most important part of your business and in some cases, they constitute the business itself. In other words, if those services are not functioning, it is not that a supporting capability is not working, but rather the primary service or product can’t be delivered. Another example is for point of sales transactions where money exchange occurs (imagine a cashier’s connectivity for a retail store). In these type of scenarios, you should consider an approach where the wired Internet diversity is augmented with cellular, 3G, 4G, LTE, 5G based WAN connectivity as well. We recommend a modern Broadband Bonding router to intelligently manage the wired and cellular connectivity in order to meet your requirements.
Budgetary goals:
Perhaps you thought increasing your single Internet connection’s speed was your only option to provide higher performance, or you thought you needed to shell out huge amounts of monthly fees to your ISP just so that they squeeze the SLAs and provide better support for your connection. However, a strategy based on multiple Internet connections might be the alternative you were looking for, especially since this strategy often includes generating savings on your operating budget. Usually, by taking advantage of a multi-WAN router, you will be able to intelligently manage, and therefore boost, both the performance as well as the reliability of cost-effective Internet connections, such as DSL, Cable, 3G/4G/LTE/5G. In fact, using a broadband bonding multi-WAN router can often rival the metrics that an expensive MPLS line can provide. Moreover, you do not necessarily have to choose one strategy or the other, as you can certainly consider boosting the performance and reliability of your thin MPLS line via adding cost-effective broadband via a multi-WAN router.
In a related blog a few weeks ago, we also compared managing multiple Internet connections with and without a multi-WAN router.
Cahit Akin, CEO, Mushroom Networks, Inc.
Mushroom Networks is the provider of Software Defined WAN and load balancing solutions capable of Broadband Bonding that enables self-healing WAN networks that route around network problems such as latency, jitter and packet loss.