Over the past few years more and more companies have woken up to the fact that adding resilience to their network connection is vital. With the National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre warning that the ‘last mile’ (between local exchange and customer premises) is the key to the resilience of a business telecommunications network’ IT departments have reached for the ‘phone and signed with one or more of the many network operators in the market.

What some businesses are failing to understand is that by simply adding an additional ‘wired’ connection they are not necessarily adding ‘true resilience’. All ADSL and SDSL broadband connections are ultimately routed via the local telephone exchange and therefore if there is a problem at this point it will impact on all the lines entering the business. Similarly any excavation work in the street poses an equal risk to all communication lines that lie below ground level – whether they be BT owned, leased lines or fibre.

The only way to ensure ‘true resilience’ is by adopting a combined wired and wireless strategy believes Urban Wimax:

“Many companies are putting all their eggs into one basket as far as their communications technology goes” says Ivan Dunn, sales manager for the company. “Just having a redundant circuit to the same exchange does not provide adequate protection. A policy of diversity of routes is what is required.

“This has been further highlighted by the Financial Services Authority in its latest guidelines where they recommend that all business critical sites use more than one telecoms and data provider to provide resilience and that these providers can demonstrate complete end to end separation across the wide area network,” adds Dunn.

“We find that many of our customers use our wireless service in conjunction with their existing wired incumbent service. We are able to provide equipment that intelligently load balances all the customers connections to both maximise throughput and ensure total continuity of service. We also find that many of the businesses we serve are so pleased with the quality and speed of their WiMAX service that they use it as their primary connection and use a traditional wired connection as the backup.”

For more information on the key benefits of the Urban Wimax service please contact Ivan Dunn on 0845 331 3008.

•Date: 9th October 2007• Region: UK •Type: Article •Topic: Telecoms continuity
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