They sure do. No one is infallible. If it’s important you, always have a backup…

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

They sure do. No one is infallible. If it’s important you, always have a backup…

Just don't make it Virgin Media, had 3 of their leased lines, and 30 coax customers go down in the space of 5 mins today

The backup doesn't need to be especially reliable. It only needs to be *independent* of your main connection, so that whatever causes a failure on your main link doesn't also cause a failure on the backup (i.e. correlated faults)

In reply to a post by candlerb:

The backup doesn't need to be especially reliable. It only needs to be *independent* of your main connection, so that whatever causes a failure on your main link doesn't also cause a failure on the backup (i.e. correlated faults)

Last thing you want in your time in need is for your backup to also go down or be flipping in and out as that provider has know issues.

While all providers have issues, last thing you want is your backup to be with another provider that is unreliable. It's like getting a Vodafone sim when you know it drops in and out when the 3 Mast is outside and one down the road a bit further so you know it will cope,

In reply to a post by RR_The_IT_Guy:

In reply to a post by candlerb:

The backup doesn't need to be especially reliable. It only needs to be *independent* of your main connection, so that whatever causes a failure on your main link doesn't also cause a failure on the backup (i.e. correlated faults)

Last thing you want in your time in need is for your backup to also go down or be flipping in and out as that provider has know issues.

Disagree. A single connection with 99% uptime gets you ~7 hours of downtime every month. Two connections with 99% uptime get you a few seconds of downtime every month, assuming they're genuinely independent.

I think the situation here is that we're talking about *mostly reliable* providers. If you have two of these, and they're not correlated, then the probability of them both being down at the same time is extremely low.

I agree that VM do sometimes have systematic faults that affect a large area, but Openreach do too. It shouldn't rule out using VM as a backup provider.

*Any* backup provider will increase your reliability. Even if your backup provider only has 90% uptime, then it increases your overall uptime by a factor of 10: i.e. the chance of losing connectivity completely is reduced by a factor of 10. I think even Virgin are better than that though

100%. (err make that 99.999% 😅)