Lease Line Backup – How To Stay Connected When Your Leased Line Goes Down
There are a number of leased line backup options to choose from.
Contended ADSL
The most popular choice for a backup connection. If your leased line goes down, you'll still be able to access the Internet. Your upstream speed will probably be reduced, as will the quality of your connection.
It's not ideal, but frankly it's cheap. And hopefully you won't have to put up with it for long, as most leased line faults are fixed within hours, not days.
Another Leased Line from a different carrier
This is another popular option, especially for critical sites such as Head Offices.
If you need a backup connection with far more upstream bandwidth than an ADSL connection, and possibly far more downstream bandwidth too, a leased line will be your only sensible option.
There are two major telecoms networks in Britain. One is run by BT Openreach. Another is run by the Wholesale division of Virgin Media Business. Your leased line provider will order one or more circuits from these companies.
Some leased line providers such as hSo can create a solution that connects your site to the Internet using two circuits: one from BT, another from Virgin Media. If one of your circuits goes down, you've still got another one that's connected to a separate network.
The more sophisticated businesses tend to go for this sort of carrier-independent resilient solution.
It's worth remembering that your leased line backup connection doesn't need to have the same bandwidth as your primary connection. For example, you might choose to backup a 100Mbps circuit with a 10Mbps circuit, to save money. That might be enough to tide you over till your primary connection was fixed.
ISDN Circuits (For Voice)
If you use your leased line to carry your phone calls, you may decide to keep one or more of your ISDN circuits as a backup option. Should your leased line ever go down, your PBX can still make and receive calls, by sending the calls over old-fashioned ISDN trunks. When the fault has been fixed, you can go back to sending calls over your leased line.
