There is nothing worse than having built a cloud based software application for your business and you cannot access it. We have years of experience in helping our clients to connect to our clustered server software solution and the Internet from difficult locations. We can recommend to our clients, solutions with always on “fail over” backup connections for your office, or, mobile devices for remote working staff or field service engineers with dual SIM 3G/4G or WiFi capability on different networks.
Office Broadband with Failover
What we can do here, is recommend a solution that has any two of the following for resilience and always on capability…
- Leased Line
- FTTP (Fibre to the Premises broadband)
- Normal Superfast Infinity Broadband
- ADSL broadband
- 4G/5G
- Two way Satellite links
- Microwave links
Remote Working Staff
For remote workers, we need to ascertain if they will be working from home or branch office on a PC or laptop, then if so, the connectivity options are similar to those for the office broadband above. However, if they are constantly moving around between client premises, then a phone or tablet with two of the following may be what you need…
- BT’s Roaming WiFi network
- Other WiFi networks
- Dual SIM 4G/5G with two different providers
4G/5G Data Roaming
There are 5 mobile network providers in the UK/Eire.
- O2
- Vodafone
- Three
- EE (T-Mobile/Orange)
- Eir (Irish Eircom/Meteor)
Any others like BTMobile, Sky, Plusnet or Virgin etc are only virtual mobile providers and partner with the above network providers to bulk sell mobile network connectivity in what is known as a “piggy backing” arrangement. They can provide a good low cost deal by offering a discounted rate for voice minutes and text, but, there may be limitations and drawbacks in that you may not be allowed to data roam (not voice roam but data roam) onto another providers network in areas of poor data connectivity.
Our findings are that we have had better mobile data results with clients who go the dual SIM route direct with two of the main mobile network providers direct, ie, not through a “piggy backing” reseller. As your data requirements is different from your voice and text requirements, consider a separate dual SIM tablet leaving your phone for receiving calls. Something to consider.
VPNs
We can offer a free VPN (Virtual Private Network) to all of our clients in order to share data across all of their their mobile devices securely over an encrypted link with our server cluster. Our VPNs work reliably over the fail over connections mentioned in all the scenarios above.
