You know how customer service is with big companies? Well, here is a funny little story.
Having my business on the web, I don't want to be without a Net connection for even a brief while, so I have two different broadband connections.
At least I thought I did, but when my primary one started getting flaky, I noticed that my secondary one did not seem to work at all.
First there was a very odd web page saying that service would resume soon, and some blaming game between big companies explained, companies I never heard of. Then there was no connection at all. And this seemed to go on, so I finally got impatient and contacted the provider, Bulldog Broadband, to find out why this was so.
They couldn't find me in their system, so I gave more data, and so on and so forth with no results. I was very patient.
Then I decided to check into the built-in web server on the wireless modem I got with the service. And I noticed that the username for loggin in was "fast4". And I remembered: I was a customer of a company named Fast4.net, not Bulldog Broadband! I had decided to change to Bulldog, but it never actually happened for some reason. I decided to forgive Bulldog for not finding my customer file.
Looking through my email archives, I found out that Fast4 has actually not billed me for months... I still have not found out what happened to that company or my account with them, but here is the last exchange between me and Bulldog:
Me:
"... Ooops, sorry, I don't think I have an account with you..."
Bulldog Broadband:
"Thank you for emailing us. Unfortunately we are unable to find your account with the details you have provided. Please can you supply us with your order reference number (BDOL) as this is necessary to verify your identity and access your account, in line with Data Protection Act regulations."
13 comments:
Having two separate connections from different providers is a wise strategy. But it's a bit of a waste to keep one on reserve in case the other one fails (if I understood you correctly?)
What you could do is deploy a simple router box in your LAN to intelligently make use of both connections at the same time. If properly configured this would effectively double your upstream bandwidth!
The reason I mention this, though, is that this would also help in monitoring the status of both links. Which is kind of a requirement for the redundancy idea to work.
I've long had two connections myself, although at the moment my servers (and the other connection) are in a different building so I can not make use of the above mentioned optimisation.
I'd no idea that was possible!
How do I do that?
(I am guessing though that since they would have different IPs, they would only do good for more than one different transfer at a time?)
This made me smile. I could do a blog just on customer calls like this but I'd better not...
"I could do a blog just on customer calls like this but I'd better not..."
Right. You'd probably get sued till the end of Times.
Which could provide the topic for yet another blog!...
eolake said: "I'd no idea that was possible!
How do I do that?"
The nice thing about TCP/IP is it's open design, you can route packets anyway you like.
The DIY way is to take any old PC and install three (3) ethernet cards: one for your LAN, and one for each outgoing connection. There are freely available software packages to run such a box. A non-techie type needs to hire someone to set one up, though.
A readily made solution is an off the shelf hardware box, typically sold under the category "Firewall", with at least three RJ45 ports, and enough configurability for specifying how to load-balance traffic between two ISP connections.
The simplest example of usage is to route all traffic destined to some heavily and continuously used remote host through one connection, and leave the other connection free for web browsing and other transient use.
"(I am guessing though that since they would have different IPs, they would only do good for more than one different transfer at a time?)
You are right. There needs to be some parallelism in order to take advantage of configurations such as this. But there often is.
Since we are now starting to use our Internet connection for "TV" and movies (downloading from iTunes and whatnot) this will soon matter a great deal.
Which could provide the topic for yet another blog!...
Pascal, you're on target. Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing?
TTL,
I'm very intriqued. I could afford to buy a router and software for this, can you direct me to a site with information about what hardware and software I'd need?
I better add that I'm no geek, it needs to be userfriendly and simple to set up.
Eolake, it's been awhile since I last "scanned the market" for such boxes for my own needs, so I am not uptodate on current recommendations. But I notice that a company called Xincom has one such product.
Also, Network World reports on their testing of five such boxes in Double your broadband, double your fun.
There's also this article by The Inquirer, which might help in grokking the terminology and assessing the benefits of this for you.
Try Googling for "dual WAN".
Thanks, man, I owe you.
You are welcome. It would be interesting to hear about the results if you end up implementing this.
I fully intend to. I've ordered a new broadband line.
Finding UK dealers for boxes, and reviews is a bit trickier.
Just stumbled over this old thread.
I tried it, it sort of worked, but in the end it was not worth it, there were always bugs, for instance my chat app crashing or reporting faults.
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