Years ago, when the Internet was in its early stages and High Speed was the “New” thing many of us relied on a “dial-up” connection for backup. And as HS became more stable and the need for dial-up lessened we dropped our dial-up lines and thus our backup. Not really a good thing, however, today’s network would barely survive if we had to use a dial-up connection. Mainly it doesn’t support a fast enough bandwidth to support today’s internet needs. However, as the HS race continues, we are faced with troubling times when there is an outage. And often, the outage has nothing to do with us, or even our Local ISP from which we get our service. Internet traffic flows along the www highway between many nodes. If some some reason, one of those nodes goes down. So might our traffic. And if the node is close enough, it might bring out entire internet down. Now, this may be infrequent, but, should it happen can you survive without, and for how long. If this is a concern for you, then you need to employ failover technology to your network. Usually, this requires the need for specific failover routers which allow the connection of multiple internet providers. Obviously, this would require two ISP accounts and thus a costly one, but, how much is lost if you go down. Some of today’s devices also allow for the use of Wireless Aircards (cell phone carriers) for the failover or backup.
If downtime is a concern, or already a problem, don’t wait til it happens again.