Advice on failover internet connection for unstable ISP

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nowwhatnapster

Limp Gawd
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Aug 9, 2009
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the place I work at has a crappy ISP situation. The voice, data, and power lines are buried under a busy street outside. There are no cable lines in the street so we are stuck with a select few ISP providers. Currently we have a 1.1 Mbit SDSL connection. Which has been having connectivity issues over the last 3-4 months. The business processes credit cards through the internet so it is vital that our connection be up.

Prior to the recent connectivity issues there were very few problems. I have come to realize that our connection is not stable enough and I am now looking into viable solutions.

I figured that we either need to buy a T1 service or have a fail over ISP. Now switching to a T1 service is a bit expensive and involved, although I know it really is the best solution. I wanted to explore the fail over ISP first. I've seen dual WAN routers before, but can it be done with a dial-up line instead? I was thinking of using a lightly used fax telephone line as a backup dial-up connection.

Anyone done this before?
 
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I'd look into maybe a 3G or other cellular data service as an emergency connection, honestly.

You could just set up a fail-over WAN with pfsense, your SDSL as the primary.
 
I'd look into either 3G or WiFi/WiMax. If you're in a metro area you should have at least one wireless provider available. Around here there are quite a few, but they're small companies and it takes some poking around to find them.

Lots of ways to do the failover itself. I use pfSense. Works great. No facility for dialup as far as I know, but I'm sure there's something out there that can do it, it's certainly possible.

And yeah, I'd investigate with your ISP first and see if they can do anything to improve it. Is it dropping because of a faulty line filter or a POTS device attached with no filtering or something possibly?
 
All the hardware here is working fine, there is never an issue. Very simple Modem > Router > Switch > PC setup.

The last two times we lost connection a technician came out and switched us to a different circuit. They said the signal was not very good. As always I am doing my best to get my ISP to fix this issue, but it is very difficult to get problems like this resolved when business is open the same hours as the ISP.

pfSense seems like the right kind of solution, but a bit to technical for me to deal with. I'd rather buy something professional tried and tested than toil with something open source.

As for cellular, 3g, I have very little knowledge of how that works for an ISP. Wouldn't I need a cellphone or similar device that was capable of sharing its WAN connection? Seems like that would be pricey. I would also be hesitant to start using Wifi or some shared network to process credit cards on...
 
3G ++

I see a lot of businesses going to a DSL/Cable with 3G backup solution. The 3G is supplied by a card and has its own contract. There are a number of Cisco routers that support the 3G cards, and even some consumer grade routers. Not sure about pfSense, but I am sure there is a way to interface it.
 
I worked at a place that had it's primary internet as a 3g card. Even for a couple of PCs, the speed sucked. But, for a backup solution it can work. You could always start playing with pfsense and setup a laptop to be the fail over network.
 
In the end we decided to get a second DSL provider and a firewall that supports dual wan's.

Cost is an additional $60/month for a 1500/128k dedicated adsl line with static ip and no contract. Its the best I could find... unfortunately,

Add that to our existing $80/month 1100/1100k line and we'll be operating at 2600/1228k for $140/month. It makes me appreciate my 15000/2000k for $45 cable line at home.

Yea it is a tad expensive, but there arent a whole lot of options where we are located. I just gotta keep praying they dig up the street some day and run cable or fiber.
 
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