There is very little more frustrating than going about your day, finally knocking things off your to do list, when suddenly the internet is down. Things get worse when there nothing you can do but be at the mercy of the internet provider to address the “area outage”.

When you only have one internet provider and you have both your data and your voice on that one line, things get significantly more interesting then. Hence, the best practice leading IT solutions companies provide of redundant internet providers.

For most companies, this is done in the following manner: one ISP for data, one ISP for voice. Using an internet load balancer each ISP line can be configured to fail over to the other. There are a number of variations on this concept depending on urgency, availability and budget. If there is only one fiber provider available, then that is paired with a cable ISP provider.

The fiber line will be configured for the highest throughput needed and depending on how many phones there are that may go to voice. With QoS (Quality of Service) in place, the fidelity of phone calls is kept high, even after a fail over. And once the ISP that has gone down comes back on line, the networks automatically reconfigure to their original states.

The result is, you never feel the outage. And what a wonderful world that is. It’s not a very complicated configuration, and the cost is certainly less than the amount of time lost waiting on internet providers even acknowledging there is an issue. This sort of ease and consistent ability to work is the result of best practices, and what managed IT services provide.