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Rant: everyone assumes a second fiber line is overkill, then they see my invoice | Business Internet - HW Forums

Rant: everyone assumes a second fiber line is overkill, then they see my invoice

I used to think dropping our backup copper line for a second fiber connection was a waste of money, especially at $180 a month on top of the main circuit. We run a small print shop in Dayton with nine employees, and last March a backhoe took out our primary line for 14 hours during a rush order week. That day cost us about $2,300 in late fees and lost jobs, which was more than a year of the second line. Here is what bugs me: people keep saying a cellular failover is good enough, but our LTE backup capped out at 4 Mbps upload and our cloud proofs would not move. The second fiber runs on a different path and our failover test last Tuesday switched over in under 30 seconds with zero dropped calls. Anyone else running dual fiber and did your provider try to talk you out of it first?

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1 Comment

ryan_carr593d ago

That $2,300 hit is the part people skip past, they only look at the $180 monthly and call it dumb. Here is the thing nobody brings up though: a second fiber line often gets you a whole second provider with its own crew, so when the backhoe guy cuts one path you are not stuck waiting on the same company that is already swamped fixing everyone else. Last big outage here in Dayton, one carrier had a two day backlog because a whole neighborhood went dark at once, and the shops with two different carriers were back up while single line folks sat there. Same carrier on both circuits does not really count, since one bad splice upstream can drop both at the same time. Your 30 second switch test is the real selling point, because a lot of cheap failover setups only kick in after the primary fully dies, and that gap is where calls get dropped. I would just make sure the two lines actually run different routes all the way out of the building, not just to the same box in the alley.