Discover why Internet Failover isn't just a backup plan—it's a design philosophy. Learn how Big Network builds edge-first resilience for real-time, always-on connectivity.
Ask anyone who built their first ISP in the late '90s what their dream was, and it probably involved a T1 line and a plywood board in a mill building. For Tom Daly, that dream was real—until the mythical T1 revealed itself as a tiny RJ-48X jack on the wall.
Fast-forward a couple decades and that same network kid now runs Big Network out of a home lab with three WANs, enterprise-grade failover gear, and more resilience than most branch offices. The internet has changed. And so has the definition of resilience.
This article isn’t just about nostalgia. It’s about how the messy, beautiful architecture of the internet has evolved—and what that means for failover, observability, and operational control when your cloud provider has a bad day, your primary ISP brownouts, or BGP sends your packets somewhere they don’t belong.
We’re no longer building networks that hope nothing breaks. We’re building networks that assume failure is a feature of the system—and plan accordingly.
Big Network’s vision for internet failover is rooted in this exact philosophy: the edge isn’t a fixed place, and uptime isn’t a checkbox. It’s a moving target. And it’s one we’re finally ready to hit.
▶ Watch the full interview on The Anycast
The term edge gets thrown around so often it’s practically lost all meaning. Some say it’s the cell tower. Others say it’s the router on your wall. In truth, the edge isn’t a place—it’s a moment. A threshold.
As Tom Daly explained on The Anycast, the most useful definition of “edge” isn’t physical at all. It’s logical. It’s the point in a network topology where you, the operator, lose control—or conversely, where you regain it.
That might be a branch router with multiple WAN links. It might be a cloud-hosted VPC with limited egress visibility. It might even be a retail location where a 5G backup sits idle until fiber flakes out.
In 2025, the edge is wherever resilience needs to happen. Wherever your user experience hinges on decisions being made in milliseconds, not in data centers. It’s wherever network policy, performance, and availability intersect in real time.
This is why Big Network’s platform isn’t just cloud-first. It’s edge-aware. It enables intelligent decisions where the stakes are highest—at the first point of failure, the last mile of delivery, and everywhere in between.
Use Case – Infinite Wireless x Big Network: https://www.bignetwork.com/use-cases/big-network-and-infinite-wireless
The internet works. Until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, network engineers often find themselves debugging routing decisions that were never designed to make sense to humans in the first place.
BGP—the Border Gateway Protocol—has held the internet together for decades. It’s a marvel of durability, but not of precision. BGP doesn’t know anything about latency, jitter, packet loss, or available bandwidth. It only knows what route exists and, loosely, how many hops away that route is. It’s like air traffic control that knows your plane can land somewhere—not whether that runway is iced over.
As Tom Daly puts it, BGP is a beacon, not a strategy. It tells you where something is, not whether it’s the best place to go. And yet, this is still how routing decisions are made at scale.
That’s why operators have turned to software-defined overlays, health checks, and path scoring to route traffic more intelligently. But too many failover strategies still hinge on BGP behaving predictably in unpredictable conditions.
At Big Network, we assume BGP will lie. Not maliciously—but because it lacks the information needed to make smart decisions. Our platform layers signal intelligence on top of BGP: real-time probes across ICMP, TCP, and UDP, dynamic link scoring, and policy-based routing decisions that do take latency and reliability into account.
Failover has to understand the difference between alive and usable. That’s not something BGP can tell you. But it’s something Big Network was built to detect.
Most vendors talk about failover like it’s a checkbox. A line item. A feature buried in a spec sheet somewhere between “supports VLANs” and “IPv6-ready.”
At Big Network, we don’t see it that way. Failover isn’t something you enable. It’s something you architect for from day one.
If you build for “always up,” you’re building for disappointment. If you build for failure, you’re building for continuity.
That distinction matters—especially when you’re supporting networks across hundreds of retail sites, cloud-native services, or remote operations with no on-site tech staff. What you need isn’t just a second link. You need an intelligent response system for failure.
This is why Big Network integrates failover logic directly into the edge. Our approach uses multi-path routing, real-time link assessment, and Static IP address capability across all transport paths. The system doesn’t just fail over—it preemptively identifies degradation and re-routes traffic before users even notice.
In other words: failover isn’t the backup plan. It is the plan.
Just ask any customer who’s Static IP Anywhere in partnership with Core Transit to maintain continuity across DIA, LTE, and satellite. The magic isn’t in the tunnel—it’s in the fact that you never even realized it switched paths in the first place.
The phrase “always online” gets thrown around a lot too—usually by providers who assume a second connection is all it takes. But anyone who’s worked in real-world networking knows two pipes don’t guarantee uptime.
For context, if there’s one line shared by two providers that’s still one pipe… Ask anyone in a major city that probably has a MSP who considered a copper line as the backup simply to ensure their primary internet and backup aren’t running in the same shared pipe.
But…
You can have two internet links and still go down. Why? Because failover isn’t just about physical diversity. It’s about orchestration, coordination, and visibility.
What happens when your LTE backup has signal but no throughput? What happens when both links are technically “up,” but DNS resolution fails or your public IP address changes mid-session? What happens when your point-of-sale system has to reconnect—and drops a payment in the process?
That’s not continuity. That’s a stall with extra steps.
Big Network solves this by treating “always online” as a system requirement, not a hope. Our architecture ensures:\n
Take retail. Most franchise locations don’t have network engineers on site. But they do have orders to process, Wi-Fi to offer, loyalty apps to authenticate, and payment terminals to protect. For them, “always online” is revenue assurance.
This is why we built Big Network’s edge stack to be smart enough for engineers and simple enough for operators. Because being online isn’t about having more pipes—it’s about knowing they’ll work when it matters.
Redundancy used to mean physical diversity. Separate providers. Separate regions. Separate points of failure. Today, it too often means multiple services running in the same cloud—under the illusion that zones, regions, or service tiers are somehow truly independent.
They're not.
The modern cloud is a convenience-first, control-last environment. And while it's great for startups and MVPs, it creates a dangerous monoculture at scale. Everyone’s infrastructure starts looking the same: same compute, same object store, same networking stack, same failure domain.
When something breaks—whether it’s a recursive DNS outage, a bad deploy in a critical control plane, or a region-wide fiber issue—it doesn’t just affect your stack. It knocks out entire ecosystems.
And yet most failover strategies still assume cloud redundancy is “good enough.” Spin up a second instance, maybe in a second region. Add some traffic steering. Hope for the best.
That’s not a failover plan. That’s a resume-generating event waiting to happen.
The problem isn’t the cloud. The problem is believing the cloud makes failure someone else’s problem. But when your checkout API dies or your logs go silent, it’s not AWS or GCP taking that call—it’s you.
True resilience means designing for failure outside the hyperscaler’s blast radius. It means keeping critical services reachable no matter who’s having a bad day. And it means choosing a network strategy that puts control back in your hands—at the edge, where it matters most.
In the early days of content delivery, edge meant pushing static assets closer to eyeballs. CDNs reshaped how we think about performance, but they also taught us something deeper: intelligence at the edge scales better than brute force at the core.
That same principle applies to connectivity.
If you're still relying on central cloud platforms or upstream ISPs to detect and react to failures, you're playing catch-up. The smart move is to bring observability, policy, and control to the customer premises—to the routers, gateways, and switches where real decisions need to happen in real time.
Modern edge environments aren’t passive. They’re directional. They make decisions. They see upstream and downstream. And they adapt faster than any NOC ever could.
Big Network was built with this shift in mind. We move decision-making closer to where the packets enter and exit. That means smarter failover, better diagnostics, and faster recovery. But more than that, it means autonomy. Your sites don’t wait for a central controller to validate a link before routing around it. They act. Locally. Intelligently.
And it’s not just about failover. It's about multipath routing. performance scoring. Cloud orchestration layered on top of physical infrastructure—without making everything dependent on the cloud itself.
In a world where outages are measured in seconds and trust in infrastructure is thin, the only way forward is to treat the edge like a brain, not a blind spot.
You can’t control what your ISP does. You can’t control if BGP gets weird. You can’t control if a cloud provider decides to throttle, reboot, or disappear a service mid-deployment.
But you can control what happens at your edge.
That’s the core belief behind Big Network’s architecture: real resilience comes from what you own, not what you lease. It starts with the gateways you deploy, the probes you trust, and the policies you define.
That’s why we built a platform where edge devices aren’t just forwarding boxes—they’re decision engines. Every gateway continuously evaluates the health of its paths using ICMP, TCP, and UDP probes. If a primary connection is degraded—not just down, but slow, erratic, or blocked—traffic moves instantly to the better path.
And because we preserve IP continuity across failover, your services don’t blink. Your VPNs stay up. Your apps stay live. Your users don’t notice a thing.
You can manage everything from the cloud—visibility, provisioning, topology, alerts—but nothing breaks if that control plane goes offline. The edge keeps thinking. That’s not a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have for anyone managing hundreds of remote sites or customer deployments.
The edge isn’t just where traffic enters the network. It’s where your reliability story begins.
And if you’re serious about uptime, control starts there.
For too long, failover has lived in the margins—an afterthought in network design, a feature buried in spec sheets, or a hope that something “just works” when things go wrong.
But in a world where connectivity powers everything—from transactions and telemetry to APIs and remote work—failover isn’t a contingency. It’s infrastructure.
The edge isn’t some abstract boundary. It’s the retail site in rural Ohio. The IoT device in a substation. The home office of a CTO. And every one of those endpoints needs to make real-time decisions about what to trust, where to send traffic, and how to keep users connected.
Big Network doesn’t treat that like an optional add-on. It’s our baseline.
We believe intelligent routing should be automatic. Observability should be built in. And failover should happen so fast, your users never know it occurred.
If the internet is a beautiful mess, our job is to make sure you can navigate it—with clarity, control, and confidence at the edge.
Let’s stop treating resilience like a backup plan. Let’s start building it into everything.
