Need help creating redundancy in internet connection.

[mfilsht170]

Existing problem: Time Warner Cable Small Business Internet - worst service ever...

My office can only have Time Warner Cable for an ISP. FIOS unfortunately is not available. Constant dropped internet connection. TWC is inept in resolving this for over a year. We experience very quick disconnect-reconnects at least once a day. They last for few seconds, but the corporate VPN shuts everything down immediately, not to mention that if it happens as you are entering a customer trade, it has a potential to create more serious problems.

What i was thinking is:

Get a dual-wan load balancing router and 4G hub from Clear. Connect TWC and 4G into the router, and ideally when TWC goes down, 4G keeps rolling...

Do you think this can work? Is it tough to configure? any recommendations on the router?

 

[Emerald]

http://www.cradlepoint.com/products/small-business-home-office-routers/mbr1200b-small-business-mobile-broadband-router#tab-techspecsfeatures

this is about $250

 

[eibgrad]

While the Cradlepoint is a nice solution, it's not a panacea. Consider your example of a customer trade. While the possibility might still be remote, it is theoretically possible a failover could occur in the middle of a transaction. And having failover protection will not recover that transaction. It merely allows you to try again (so to speak) once the cellular connection is up and running. IOW, a switch between providers (cable vs. cellular) doesn't preserve context within a transaction. But that will only affect long lived transactions, and only if these “outages” are very common. So just beware it won't solve every problem, but probably most.

 

[mfilsht170]

which router within reason would you recommend... something that is sold on amazon preferrably... thank you so much!

 

[Emerald]

you have not given us a budget.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=MBR1200B

 

[mfilsht170]

preferrably under 200 dollars, from amazon, they have the best return policy...thank you so much...

 

[mfilsht170]

i don't know anything about this cradlepoint, are there some brand name routers that would be suitable?

 

[bill001g]

I suspect cradlepoint was recommended because they are the leading vendor in routers that are designed to work with 3g/4g solutions.

A cisco rv042 is a common router that people have used for dual wan.

Still no router on its own can solve the key issue "is the network down". How is it suppose to detect this. It not like the ethernet ports turn off or something.

The common way this is done in larger companies is to actually run a routing protocol to each ISP. They pretty much send messages back and forth asking are you still there and take actions based on this.

The only way I have seen this done with consumer or small business grade ISP is to use a external service to bond the links together. There are couple of companies that claim to be able to make 2 connection appear as a single connection and share the bandwidth and run on just one if it fails. I have my doubts that they can actually combine 2 ISP with greatly different latencies but they may be able to run backup.. I will let you search for them because I do not feel confidant enough to recommend one.