Dual/resilient internet access 2 x flavours

Many businesses can't afford any internet downtime, and they often purchase 2 fibre circuits to provide resilience.

Traditionally, they would pick 2 different fibre providers - for example, BT and Colt to ensure that if one provider went down, the other would kick in.

But did you know that BT provides a failover service called RO2, which supplies you with 2 different BT fibres?

You'd think that this would be madness, as if BT had an issue, both lines could go down.

There is, however, a method to this madness:

When ordering fibre from 2 different fibre providers, they do not share information, so both fibres could be routed to the same exchange using the same underground route. If the exchange goes down or many fibres are cut in the street, you will lose all internet access.

BT's RO2 solution is fully diverse. BT routes cables diversely, both within your building and in the street. They route each cable to different exchanges.

So you can see, at first glance, RO2 sounds bad. It does, in fact, have benefits over the 2 (typical) fibre provider option.

That said, if BT had a routing issue or some other fault in their core network, it could affect both fibres - a scenario worth considering, albeit a rare occurrence. BT quote a 99.9996% uptime SLA on RO2