In a traditional failover setup, your router might not even detect the issue—or it might detect it too late.
Redundancy is the fallback plan. Resilience is what keeps you online. And in 2025, too many IT leaders are betting on the former—hoping that a second ISP means their business is covered when the primary one fails. It doesn’t.
This article is a call for clarity. Because the more we talk to service providers, the more we realize that most multi-site businesses think they’ve “solved” internet failover by wiring in a second circuit and calling it a day.
But failover isn’t about how many internet providers you pay. It’s about whether your traffic survives the failure.
And unless you’re using a persistent Static IP address across both links—like the one Core Transit and Big Network deploy together—your connection might fail more often than you think.
Let’s start with the most common assumption: if you have two ISPs, you’re protected.
Technically, that’s true. But operationally? Not so much.
Here’s what a typical dual-WAN setup looks like:
This is known as WAN Failover—or, more plainly, “wait for a failure, then switch.”
And this is considered “State of the Art” - guess what we hear for most dual-WAN setups:
I wish we were kidding about this.
It works in theory. But in practice?
Even if your backup ISP is active within seconds, your session-based apps aren’t smart enough to recover. And worse, most routers don’t give you visibility into what happened—or why.
On paper, a second ISP feels like an insurance policy. In reality, most dual-ISP setups still rely on manual intervention. Someone has to notice the outage, log into the router, swap cables, or reroute traffic—and by then, your customers have already hit reload or walked away.
Even with advanced gear, many businesses experience dropped calls, disconnected VPNs, and SaaS sessions that time out—because their backup circuit doesn't maintain a Static, world routable IP adress. It’s not that having two pipes is bad. The transition between them is fragile and outdated.
In short, Two ISPs without intelligent orchestration can still mean a costly outage.
Now let’s talk about what real resilience looks like.
Core Transit, a virtual network provider, needed a better way to deliver seamless uptime across its managed sites. Traditional failover tools didn’t cut it. So they partnered with Big Network to build something more innovative: Static IP Anywhere™, powered by Big Network..
The idea? Use both internet connections simultaneously. No waiting. No switchover.
SIPA tunnels both WAN links into a single persistent Static IP address presence, allowing:
Instead of relying on a dumb router to wait and react, Core Transit’s customers now operate with constant connectivity—even during major ISP outages.
Their backup circuit isn’t backup anymore. It’s part of a multipath mesh that adapts continuously. And for industries that can’t afford downtime—like government buildings, libraries, or healthcare clinics—that difference is everything.
Read more: Core Transit & Big Network Use Case
We broke this down in What Happens When the Internet Fails, but let’s summarize:
When your primary ISP fails, it’s rarely a clean process.
You might have:
In a traditional failover setup, your router might not even detect the issue—or it might detect it too late.
That’s why we use multi-protocol probes across ICMP, TCP, and UDP, as well as performance scoring from our platform. It’s not just “up or down.” It’s nuanced. And that’s what enables accurate continuity.
This isn’t just for banks and data centers anymore. If you run a VNO (Virtual Network Operator), or if your clients include:
…then seamless failover isn’t a luxury—it’s a requirement.
They don’t care if it was your primary or backup link that failed. They care that their payment went through, their Zoom call stayed live, and their customer didn’t walk away.
Most failover solutions today are just marketing spins on redundancy. You can read more in Failover vs. Redundancy, but the key distinction is:
If your router or gateway still drops traffic while “failing over,” it’s redundant, not resilient.
If it can reroute traffic mid-packet with no downtime, then it’s a failover.
Here’s what Big Network + Core Transit has proven:
If your failover strategy is still “have a second ISP and hope,” you’re behind. True continuity requires:
That’s what Static IP Anywhere™ and Core Transit deliver. And in a world where uptime is table stakes, you can’t afford to treat failover like an afterthought.
See how SIPA works
Talk to Big Network about Core Transit integration
Big Network Enables Core Transit Static IP Services
Want help modeling the ROI of a failover strategy for your business? Talk to our team.
