multi-wan setup vs larger single connection

Question

I am trying to decide whether or not a situation makes sense. I was thinking about going to a T1 or a E10 connection but am now trying to weight the costs vs what I actually need.

This setup is for a small business with around 10 employee's. Currently we run our email and website offsite. I am looking to put everything in house and this is why I am looking at a new setup. Currentlly we have a Rogers cable connection with 30mb/2mb dynamic ip.

What I was thinking for a multiwan was to get a Rogers cable 10mb/2mb with 5 static IP addresses. I would then keep the 30mb/2mb dynamic for regular browsing. The static IP connection was going to use to host the email and web stuff.

My question essentially is, is it worth it to setup a multi-wan setup or just go with the one connection.

My concern is that a multi-wan setup will complicate things way beyond necessary.

The thing is the T1/E10 connections are much more expensive than a multi-wan setup.

So what I essentially need to decide is the increase in monthly cost worth it just to keep the complexity of the setup down?

Answer 1

If you go the multi WAN route I would recommend the second connection be DSL instead of cable from the same provider so you have some connectivity when the cable goes down. That having been said, I think the multi WAN option is perfect for companies of your size. It can get complicated but you can solve a lot of the problems by buying a multi WAN router. It is simply a router that has two WAN ports so you can connect both WAN connections to the router. You can set up failover rules on them to control what happens when one connection goes down and control which systems use which connection when both are up.