When FiOS becomes “Frequent Interruption of Service”

We love the cloud.  We work and live in the cloud. So, when our Verizon FiOS service became unreliable, we had a plan.

The upside of cloud services is that they are available from anywhere you have Internet service.  The down-side is that downtime means disruption.

We Have Options

Redundancy is the most common option considered to avoid Internet service disruptions. In our location, we could add a Charter business connection along side our Verizon FiOS service, and reconfigure our Cisco ASA 5505 to load balance and manage fail-overs. The upside: we avoid outages and service quality issues; the downside is the setup cost and recurring fees.

For now, we have taken a tactical approach. Our service issues are frequent, but short in duration (the side effect of DDOS attacks elsewhere on the network).  When quality drops or the service is down completely, we switch to our MiFi and smartphone HotSpots for Internet access.  By disabling WiFi and relying on the 4G LTE service, we run a softphone client on our iPhones and Android phones, providing full telephony capability and coverage.

While we may deploy a redundant carrier in the future, the flexibility of our cloud-based services and our cellular based Internet access are sufficient in the short term.  Having options, and being able to work, is all part of our Business Continuity planning.