How do LTE and 5G enhance network failover and redundancy for business continuity?

Wireless strategies for business continuity gain importance as enterprise expand IoT, cloud, and other technologies.

Our evolving world has seen uninterrupted connectivity become a business requirement. With cloud services, IoT devices, and increasing mobility putting a strain on wired network architecture, more organizations are looking to adopt a wireless wide-area network (WAN) to keep a competitive edge.

An enterprise needs to be proactive about network failover. It is no longer enough to solely rely on wired lines for backup connectivity and redundancy. Today availability, reliability, and bandwidth are the three mandatory capabilities for any network failover solution.

Historically, enterprises added multiple wired connections for network failover. This might seem like a good way to ensure internet uptime, but it doesn’t always provide the guaranteed connectivity that organizations now require.

When adding a failover wired connection to a fixed location, typically the new secondary link enters the facility through the same trench as the primary connection. The enterprise is putting itself at risk of network interruption due to accidents during construction or other maintenance.

Another option is to install a new wire through a different entrance, but that costs time and money that enterprises often can ill afford. A more effective and economical solution is a high-performance wireless failover connection. This ensures diversity by providing a secondary connection that can’t be physically interrupted.

When network service is interrupted, reliable management access is required to securely diagnose and fix any problems. To alleviate the need for an onsite IT team, Cradlepoint’s NetCloud Service and endpoints enable Out-of-Band Management (OOBM) so IT teams can troubleshoot issues remotely. Having a direct connection from an LTE adapter’s console port to the primary router at a branch location enables network managers to diagnose and sometimes fix problems even if the wired link is not available.

Life Storage, with hundreds of self-storage locations across the U.S., struggled with reliable connectivity. Its third-party-managed, USB-based modems could not handle the growing number of connected devices that helped drive business. After deploying Cradlepoint’s NetCloud Service and branch routers, Life Storage’s IT team has been able to remotely control all devices and connections.

Even when a network failover link kicks in, businesses still require sufficient bandwidth to support the transfer of all required company data. With an all-in-one branch networking solution, you can switch between wired and wireless connections without degrading bandwidth, ensuring business continuity.

Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) technologies support bandwidth aggregation and traffic segregation between both wired and wireless WAN links. With lower-bandwidth LTE connections, SD-WAN allows IT teams to set configurations that ensure critical data always has precedence on the wireless failover link. With higher-bandwidth Gigabit-Class LTE and 5G connections, all traffic can continue to flow over the backup link.

Wireless failover allows businesses in any industry to never skip a beat.

Learn more about wireless strategies for addressing enterprise networking challenges from Cradlepoint's WANs Without Wires white paper.