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Right now my first dream is to have my own dsl connection. The problem with this is that it takes months or almost a year before your application for a dsl connection gets approved. Wifi is not a good choice for me because I work for 16 hours and the weather here in our place is not consistent or good always.

I got the second Orange line after the BT went down for a week and a ran up a £400 GPRS bill..gulp…which work paid…phew.

Moral of that story, get a back up solution.

If restarting my routers and taking a break for a few minutes doesn’t cure any troubles, I switch in order of descending preference to (1) neighbor’s WiFi to DSL, (2) Panera free WiFi, or (3) my high speed cellular data connection.

I’ve actually never gotten beyond option (1). But it’s good to know the other choices are available.

@Chris – while I love the idea of just popping over to the local co-working spot I know that not everywhere is that lucky – for example, in Salt Lake City, where I currently hang my hat we’re trying to move things in that direction but we’re still running into a lot of blank stares. Hopefully though we’ll all have the creature comforts of Silicon Valley (but without the housing prices). ;)

@Cod – I’m amazed at how fast this has changed. Two years ago when I moved to the ‘burbs I could easily find a half dozen unprotected wifi spots sitting in my front room. Now, however, not a single one doesn’t require a password. I’m sure I could go war driving but its good to see that some basic security principles are filtering down to non-tech users.

@Logical Extremes – You make a fantastic point about the Internet connection not being the only ‘weak link’. I’ve got a UPS on my shopping list. I’ve learned the hard way – I suffer way more power outages for much longer periods in the spankin’ new burbs than I ever did living downtown (where the infastructure is much older).

about Dialup: sure, any ISP worth there salt has at least local dial up numbers – but I’m guessing that’s no where near enough bandwidth for VOIP like Vonage or Skype. At best, is that a check email and update blogs option?

Why on earth would you need three broadband connections? I just can’t conceive of any home based business that needs that level of redundancy – if something takes 2 of them out it’s likely to kill the third too.

To me this is a business decision and I just can’t see the need to redundant connections to a home office – it just isn’t going to matter if I’m offline for a few minutes and if it’s longer I can grab the laptop and hit a cafe. If you’re in a remote location and don’t have that option, I can see a second connection… but otherwise this seems like a crutch, not a IT need born from considered analysis

But don’t forget about other points of failure too, like power. I have battery backup on my computer, and separate battery backup units to power my switches, router, modems, etc. So even if the premises goes dark, I can keep on surfing for some time.

RUS’ suggestion of a load-balancing router is also an interesting choice for the bandwidth-challenged DSL setups. For probably less than $50/month, add a second land line with DSL and run it through the load-balancing router along with the first.

That said, I’ve got two broadband connections, EVDO, dail up in case Armageddon comes. And I’m evaluating two more broadband connections against a T1. I expect I will settle on three broadband connections from three different providers, but that’s very unusual for a home office in my experience.

However, around 2003 or so I noticed it had been about 18 months since my last outage on either line, and that was due to a cable cut in the neighborhood and knocked them both out. So I have used one DSL line since, and have never had reason to regret the decision.

If I had some kind of extended outage I would probably take a one day vacation or tote my laptop to the nearest Starbucks, or even use the local library. I also have a client within driving distance that would let me work for a day or two in their office. It’s just not worth the extra monthly fees to have the redundancy.

If we’re talking exceptional circumstances go to a cafe. But if your net connection doesn’t have 99% uptime you need to take a hard look at things. If it does, then doubling your connection cost to cover 1% outage seems expensive, esp since that outage might well happen when you’re asleep, etc.

If your neighbors aren’t clued in on wireless security you may not even need to ask ;)