Well, it happened. Our Internet access, which is a full T1, went down and we did not have a backup strategy. And guess what? It will never happen, again. I know what you're thinking, "never say never," but I was determined, so please read on.

Imagine no email, no data downloads, no browsing, no VPN (Virtual Private Network) connectivity, and especially no streaming real-time stocks, (not that I want to see what's left of my stock portfolio). It was a devastating 72 hours of hell and it happened to us this past April (2001).

Our "Tier One" provider, no names mentioned, were unresponsive and, as I would have predicted, blamed the LEC (Local Exchange Carrier) for the outage. Our service was finally restored, but we went three entire months experiencing daily outages.

I became fanatical. Neither my company nor I was going be left hostage to the "NET" ever again. I told myself that there has to be a cost-effective, affordable solution to this problem.

To compound matters even more, AUDITEL was just beginning a project for a client, which required bulletproof, inexpensive broadband access to the Internet for an Internet-based medical practice software application. Talk about pressure!

Think about it. If AUDITEL can't provide a stable Internet access environment for our own needs, then how can we solve a particular client's need? We had to deliver a solution, and deliver it very quickly.

What I am about to divulge deserves a US patent and we just might apply for an intellectual patent after all the time, energy, and expertise expended on this project. Many thanks go out to our LAN Manager, Roger Michaud, on his determination and knowledge, which brought a successful end to this project.

Our number one objective was for sustainable, uninterruptible, high-speed Internet access. Our second, equally important objective was to provide this access, inexpensively. By now you are probably saying, "Joe has lost his marbles!"

The first task at hand was to find a new primary Internet provider. In addition, we needed to find one that provided fractional T1 services, because full T1 service (1.544Mbps) was overkill for our small office. Our building is one of four, three story buildings in our small office park.

As some people refer to me as the "King of Aggregation" in New Hampshire, I said to myself, "I couldn't be the only business in this office park requiring high-speed access." Keep in mind that there is no DSL service in our bustling town, so the choices for high-speed Internet access are slim to none. So, we did a survey of the business tenants and found four interested clients in two of the buildings.

We partnered up with a local wireless company, Third Rail Americas, and they began the engineering, design, and installation of a land-based/wireless MDU Internet service offering.

The system is served by terrestrial T1 into our building, which has now become the POP (Point of Presence) for the office park. Unlicensed wireless hardware will provide the other buildings within the office park service. A small server will allocate the bandwidth by IP (Internet Protocol) address to each company.

Ok, problem number one is solved. We now have inexpensive fractional T1, (on all the time), Internet access. Now we had to find an inexpensive way to build diversity and backup into our network. If some of you remember my article about satellite technology a while ago, then you can probably guess what my backup system of choice would be.

For several months, we have been researching various satellite technologies. We chose the Tachyon system (www.tachyon.com). We like the technology so much that we decided to become the first reseller in New England for them.

Well, several weeks ago the system was installed. The tech showed up at 1:00 pm and by 5:00 pm we were online, surfing the Internet wirelessly. Now the fun part begins. How can we "marry" the wireless connection with the terrestrial connection so that we can load balance the two services and also have a seamless failure scenario?

After about two weeks of research, a company called Nexland came to the rescue. I have to tell you all, this is the best little router we have seen on the market for a mere $399.00 dollars. I don't usually endorse products, but you folks really need to check out www.nexland.com.

This sophisticated router not only solved our problem of load balancing the two Internet circuits, but also provided a seamless fail-over when one of the circuits goes down, or, for that matter, even hiccups. To take things to the extreme, we have connected a 56k modem to a port on the back of the router, which gives us even more protection via dial/analog backup if both circuits were to fail.

In summary folks, using technology and some Yankee ingenuity, we now have two business-class Internet services with a dial backup, terminated in a single piece of hardware at half the cost we were paying for one, full T1. You gotta love it.

About the author

Jospeh Scotti is President & CEO of AudiTel, Inc. AudiTel specializes in the design and integration of voice, video and data systems for multihousing, municipalities, health care facilities and other institutions.