Aggregate some bandwidth

Most companies are pretty good at planning for a hardware failure with backups of sensitive data. Most people, however, don’t consider the value of bandwidth redundancy.

Enter the Splitronic Broadband Aggregator. This thing is cool - just plug one broadband source in one end and the other in the other end and it will do the rest. For instance, you could feed the router a T1 line and a DSL line. It will balance the load for your users and essentially make a fat pipe out of the two lesser pipes. This provides you with an inexpensive way to add additional users to your network without going for expensive broadband options.

Another benefit of broadband aggregation is that the router can smartly determine if one of the lines drops out and route your load through the working connection. The speed will typically be noticably slower when this happens, but at least you will have a backup solution in place while you fix the problem. This allows most companies to perform their most critical tasks - for us this would include taking orders, answering emails, shipping orders, etc. And maybe, if there’s a little bandwidth left, writing on our blog.

I think this product is so cool because inevitably our internet goes down a few times a year - getting a cheap DSL backup that is always there in the background just in case is well worth the $30 or so per month. An added benefit is the increase in bandwidth.