If you are a business then your internet connection is the lifeline of your business and no matter how much you try and rationalise that yes, electricity and phone are important, but your internet connection is the one you really notice when its gone.
With your internet connection you perform a multitude of tasks including sending and receiving email, manage your web site, upload files with ftp, view video presentations, use voice over ip systems, view web sites…well you get the idea, you do alot of stuff with it.
I know for a fact that if my connection in my office drops for 20 seconds I notice!
Now, as we know, adsl/broadband is usually 99.9% reliable but there is that small percent where its not and sometimes that small tiny bit of downtime is critical because more than often if your internet does happen to go down then getting it fixed can be a time consuming nightmare.
Believe me, I live in Spain and in general the internet works ok but when it goes wrong, its a series of phone calls with junior level tech support at the phone company and at least 10 minutes of convincing them that I know what I am talking about and its really actually a problem at their end and nothing to do with the fact I use windows Vista or Windows XP.
Anyway, I was doing some searching and came across this brilliant product from Xincom and its labelled as a “Twin Gateway Redundancy Product”.
Front of the Xincom DPG603
That sounds a bit fancy but essentially what its does is allows you to connect two different adsl lines (or 3G or anything that connects to the internet) to a little box which in turns plugs into your network.
Now why would you want 2 internet connections?…I hear you say.
Having two internet connections from two totally different providers allows you a level of redundancy that you don’t get with only one adsl line.
However it does depend on how important your internet is to you. With adsl lines being really cheap these days as a business you can most certainly afford to have two connections!
When your adsl line goes down, that’s it, there is no internet until it comes back again but with a twin gateway product like the Xincom, it will automatically see that the primary line is down and switch to the secondary connection. (sure if both go down then yes, no internet again but xincom does do an 8 and a 16 gateway version of this)
This means if the internet goes down with one provider you will be switched to the next available provider.
BRILLIANT!
Up until now, these kind of boxes were only really available to hosting companies because they would cost in excess of several thousand euros but at a few hundred euros these days (and cheaper if you get them off ebay), its now possible for the home or office to have the same kind of redundancy.
You simply plug the unit into your existing network, make some changes to your computers gateway settings and away you go!
Rear of the Xincom Unit