Hello to everyone in this great field we call the WISP world. Today I'm bringing you a really interesting topic so that each of you can guarantee high availability for your service and avoid unhappy customers frustrated by constant outages.
Has this happened to you before? Not sure how to react in these situations? We'll walk you through how to handle this stressful scenario. We'll give you one of many solutions; in this case we'll talk about link redundancy — but it's also important to consider your backup system with a battery bank for when the CFE (utility power) goes down.
Redundancy is about ensuring the network survives a failure by providing alternate data paths when a link goes down. There are two basic redundancy techniques that keep data communication running:
- Active redundancy: both links are active at the same time.
- Passive redundancy: one link is active and the other is on standby.
Here are a few other types of redundancy that may interest you:
Carrier redundancy
Traffic exits through two different carriers (for example, Alestra or Transtelco) sharing a single delivery link. The configuration is handled logically.
Media redundancy
Traffic exits through a single carrier; the media can be microwave or fiber optics. There are several connection options:
- 2 media, same site (same carrier).
- 2 media and infrastructure (same carrier).
- 2 media and a different carrier.
- 2 media, infrastructure and 2 carriers.
- 2 carriers, the same medium.
- 2 media and infrastructure (sites), 1 carrier.
Infrastructure redundancy
The backup works like this: if one site fails, the backup link is routed to the other site, whether over an independent fiber or a microwave link.
I hope you find this useful and put it into practice now or in the not-too-distant future, or that you can pass this knowledge on to others. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the content — or even what kind of redundancy you use yourself.