Load balancing for VOIP and business internet connection uptime September 15, 2008
Posted by mycto in Infrastructure.Tags: Alvaco, internet connection, load balancer, reliability
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Load balancer
VOIP, or voice over IP, is changing communications for small and large businesses. Using an internet connection, businesses are able to connect to other offices, call long distance and manipulate incoming phone data in ways that previously would have cost 10 or 20 times these new solutions.
Ofcourse, because VOIP is dependant upon internet connection reliability, I still hear stories monthly from companies who have their service cut for a period of time. Although these outages are usually short-term (10 minutes or less), this is an unacceptable loss considering that phone service uptime is something that most businesses take for granted.
There are new and inexpensive devices on the market that help to negate this risk. These devices are called load balancers, and they do exactly what they are called and more.
Simply put, businesses can use these devices to share and balance internet connections from more than one supplier, meaning that there is no single point of internet connection failure. One of my clients installed two connections–one from their local cable-based internet provider and the other from their telco-based provider. The device can also be set to prioritize to use one provider over the other and has a large number of other criteria that can be set.
These devices can also be used for the entire office infrastructure so that internet connection time is increased from a reliability standpoint. What is the cost to your business if “the web” is down for 1 hour? Exactly.
These devices used to cost 10 or 20 grand and can now be had for under a thousand bucks. A small price to pay for peace of mind.
Here is a two port version of one of my favorites:
