We looked at how we helped a law firm get reconnected to the internet to keep their business from losing more time and money. One may think, “I can get on the internet, isn’t that enough?” Let us tell you, it’s not. How does one determine the stability of their connection? Here are three things to help monitor and diagnose a healthy internet connection to ensure internet outages won’t disrupt your business. 

Diversity 

Diversity of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can help minimize downtime and save money and crucial time for a business. With internet connections from different providers, a company’s failover setup will have a much better chance of being able to route around issues affecting one ISP or carrier’s network, leading to less downtime. To get the most out of internet connections is to diversify the types of connections. Pick the connection types that provide an ISP and the best shot at maximum uptime. According to BigLeaf’s analysis of 1,700+ customers’ various internet connections, the connection types that deliver the most reliable percentage of uptime are in this order: fiber, enterprise fixed wireless, cable, copper, T1/T3, other fixed wireless, DSL, cellular, and satellite. 

Learn more about one of our key partners, Nitel:  

Connection Health 

Many traditional internet failover options only take effect when the primary internet connection completely fails. There is no awareness of network performance metrics for things like jitter and latency, which can make the internet unusable when they occur, especially when using VoIP services. According to Comparitech, jitter of more than 20 ms will cause delays in packet arrival while latency of 150 ms or higher will cause lagging in video or audio. These performance issues are a more frequent problem than full-fledged outages, meaning that a setup should be aware of all aspects of connection health.  

A way to better your connection health and lessen the occurences of jitter and latency is through your internet configuration. 

Active-active configuration 

Traditional internet failover options have an active-passive configuration where a secondary Internet connection is strictly a backup. With an active-active configuration, all internet connections are actively carrying some of the traffic at any given time — allowing traffic to seamlessly move to one or both internet connections based on the type of traffic and the integrity of any connection at any time. SD-WAN is a great tool to smarter data trafficking.  

Access Tech knows that internet connections come and go – that even when you do have a connection, the stability may be unreliable. Access Tech understands how important it is to ensure that you are always connected and getting the best speeds you can to run a business efficiently. Contact us at Access Tech and schedule a free 15-minute call where we can guide you through the process of understanding your internet connection health. We have been helping customers for over a decade connect business strategy with IT solutions.