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You should be pitching that your customer has 2 ISP’s at their office!

Written by George Bardissi | Oct 10, 2016 7:09:05 PM

The Truth

While I understand that in some parts of the world it’s hard enough to get 1 solid internet connection to your customer’s office(s); internet redundancy is no longer a luxury you can choose to ignore. The hard truth is that most business are crippled if the internet goes down for multiple reasons. As an IT or MSP you feel that pain when your customer starts shooting bullets at your help desk when the internet is down for any prolonged period of time. We have all been there I know I have been on the receiving end of that line.

If you are in the strategic IT advisor / consulting role its critical that you make sure you customers have not just 1 but 2 internet providers. For companies that are distributed with many employees working from home that’s not as critical a requirement granted. This is more targeted a conversation around tradition office environment.

The Options

This dual internet approach can be a combination of many different avenues:

  • Cable
  • DSL
  • ISDN/T1
  • Fiber
  • Metro Ethernet
  • 4G / LTE
  • Microwave

The Pitch

The conversation with your customer should be around the loss of productivity when the office can’t connect to the internet. It’s a similar conversation to making sure your customer has a comprehensive backup / disaster recovery solution in place or computer security solution in place. It’s almost an insurance conversation really. How much is it worth to keep the business running vs. being down for a prolonged period of time?

A way to take advantage of 2 Internet Connections from a VoIP Perspective

Most business grade firewall/router devices can automatically fail over between ISP’s should one go down. From our world, when you have 2 ISP’s in play you can easily separate voice and data traffic between the two connections providing a QoS effect that helps you. If one provider goes down, then the router/firewall can fail over merging both onto one connection until the 2nd ISP is back up and running.

Invest in Monitoring those internet Connections

Since the internet is so important to your customer’s business it’ worth investing in a robust ISP monitoring solution. There are several software and SaaS solutions available to IT and MSPs that can keep active traffic stats on things like:

  • Uptime
  • Latency
  • Jitter
  • Packet Loss
  • Route Changes
  • Throughput

Take an active approach to the internet conversation and you will prevent pain and win in the end.