Why business customers use Fixed Wireless / Microwave Internet for redundancy

The cost of business disruption in the cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS) dependant world of today can add up significantly. Without Internet connectivity a modern business can be crippled resorting to operating off mobile devices or sending staff home. 

Last year NBN revealed it had seen 501,600 service faults across 5.5 million services active on its network.  That’s 1 in 10 services had an issue over the 1-year period.  These links are going to fail, its only a matter of when. 

The typical carrier fibre service (non NBN) typically has fantastic uptime when all is well.  Should a fibre break occur requiring civil works to access damaged fibre or replace a length of fibre underground, restoration times can take several days.  In 2008 we saw the entire state of Qld isolated from the Optus network due to a fibre cut on the Gold Coast. Even with the entire Queensland state and Northern NSW offline, the fault took half a day to resolve. Imagine how long you will be waiting if you are a Brisbane based 100 person business in the job queue, on hold, waiting. 

Given the risk of disruption many businesses when next considering an increase in link capacity are not upgrading the current link, they are adding a second link via Fixed Wireless / Fixed Microwave to provide the gold standard in path and technology diversity.  This second link is then used in an active/active configuration providing the required additional performance as well as the ability to dynamically move traffic between links should a link fail or experience a degraded service.  Modern routers, firewalls and Unified threat management (UTM) devices have traffic performance monitoring and intelligent routing capabilities built in. 

A typical customer scenario initial non redundant state is:

• 100M/100M Telstra fibre link  

• Connected to a basic router performing Network Address Translation (NAT)  
• No real firewall protection with application awareness.   
• Should this single fibre link fail the business is offline. 
• Should there be an issue in the Telstra backbone network the business is offline. 

How to tripple the capacity and add real, dynamic redundancy:

• 200M/200M Polyfone Microwave service is added.  
• The 100M Telstra fibre service is also retained. 

• The customer has renegotiating a better deal with Telstra now that there is a competitive like solution option. 
• A UTM such as a Fortinet gateway is implemented to provide load balancing of traffic, link failover and application aware security services. 

The customer now has a more resilient, more secure and higher performing solution, typically at the same price point as just upgrading that 100M fibre to 300M and losing out on redundancy and providing the essential security needed to protect any Internet connected business today. 

Polyfone can help guild your business to build a highly available, high performance secure Fixed Wireless / Microwave Internet solution for your single site or multi-site business. 

References 

https://www.zdnet.com/article/nbn-seeing-over-500000-service-faults-annually-from-5-5-million-connections/ 

https://www.crn.com.au/news/optus-outage-disrupts-qld-airport-emergency-services-116954