For Business - DSL ATM Frame Relay Gateway & Router Suggestions

[alex781021]

Hi everyone, recently I've taken over all of the back office work for a small lodge at a ski resort here in Utah. We've moved over our booking system to a SaaS solution (Hotelogix) and now the internet connection, which is also shared by the guests in the lodge, is our main concern.

The current DSL available is 7mbps and uses ATM Frame Relay technology. I can't really just buy any router/gateway on the market for our business then as a lot don't seem to support this older technology.

My ISP suggested the PK5000z as a solution but I'm not sure if it's really what we need. Do any of you have any suggestions on what to do? Like I said, internet up time is our biggest concern.

I currently can't invest in a 3G hot spot to guarantee 99.99% up time due to the costs but it'll probably be something we'll look at for next season 12/13.

Thanks!

 

[theevilsharpie]

ATM and Frame Relay are separate and mutually exclusive switching technologies. Which one are you actually using? DSL will most likely use ATM, in which case any reasonably modern DSL modem/router should work. I'm not sure about Frame Relay over DSL, although Cisco or Juniper should have routers available for that use case. That being said, I'm not a WAN technology expert, so you should seek other opinions.

As far as uptime goes, if your business relies on an internet-based SaaS app to function, you should have at least two connections to the Internet at any given time.

 

[alex781021]

The guy over the phone kept saying "ohhh ATM Frame Relay" ... I guess I really need to clarify what it is exactly they provide up here. It's up here in Alta, UT so they only provide service to a town of ~350

 

[theevilsharpie]

Every ISP I've ever dealt with that sells service directly to end users has also provided a router or Ethernet bridge that's compatible with their service. I'm curious why your ISP hasn't offered you one.

 

[alex781021]

The PK5000z was what they offered, I'm just wondering if I'm selling myself short with this model.

 

[theevilsharpie]

If they've offered you a modem, I don't see any reason not to use it. Using your own equipment can cause headaches if you ever need to open a support ticket. There are some benefits to using your own equipment if you have a particular use case and you know exactly what you're doing, but that doesn't sound like the case here (no offense).

 

[alex781021]

If they've offered you a modem, I don't see any reason not to use it. Using your own equipment can cause headaches if you ever need to open a support ticket. There are some benefits to using your own equipment if you have a particular use case and you know exactly what you're doing, but that doesn't sound like the case here (no offense).

I don't know a whole lot about DSL, flat out, I've never used the technology before. I feel sufficient with networking and using DD-WRT to flash routers

 

[Emulex]

use their gear in bridge mode and rock a pfsense or similar unified threat management pc. run them in a vm for easy HA (proliant microservers) with vmware essentials. let them take care of the physical gear and you deal with the simple stuff like multi-wan,content filtering, etc. that is how i roll.