Cox Business Net Assurance, a new service, uses two strategies to maintain connectivity during an Internet service interruption or power outage.
If a customer’s Internet service is interrupted, the wired and private Wi-Fi connections automatically failover to a wireless LTE network. The system selects the best of available options from multiple providers. If power is lost, an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) battery provides as much as four hours of power. The UPS is equipped with surge protection.
Pricing for Cox Business Net Assurance service was not disclosed. Cox Business provides voice, data and video services for a more than 370,000 small and regional businesses and other entities such as schools, healthcare providers and government offices nationwide.
“Loss of power shouldn’t result in a productivity outage, too. Today’s businesses need reliable connectivity service to keep operations running smoothly,” Catherine Mitchell, Cox Business’s vice president of product, said in a press release. “Net Assurance will reduce downtime for our customers and give them the protection they need to keep their teams online.”
Providing disaster recovery and business continuity service like Cox Net Assurance is increasingly important. Luckily for the service providers, the proliferation of fiber networks, the general decentralization of networks and diversification of assets due to emergence of cloud services, edge computing, virtualization and software-defined networks inherently creates these environments.
Cox will soon have many more businesses to sell Net Assurance to. In late April, Cox said that it is acquiring North Carolina-based regional operator Segra from EQT Infrastructure. Segra operates a fiber network across nine states and has more than 10,000 on-net locations and connects to more than 7,000 wireless towers. The company owns nine data centers.
