BTC Broadband’s Focus on Network Resiliency, Redundancy & Diversity
At BTC Broadband, ensuring a reliable, high-performance internet experience isn’t just a goal... it’s our promise. Our Chief Operating Officer, Stephen Harris, sat down with us recently to share insights on how BTC is strengthening the backbone of our network to deliver consistent, uninterrupted service through strategic upgrades in resiliency, redundancy, and diversity.
Why now?
As technology continues to advance and user demands evolve from bandwidth-intensive applications to mission-critical cloud services, it’s essential that our infrastructure not only keeps pace but leads the way. At BTC Broadband, ongoing upgrades are part of how we ensure performance, scalability, and reliability for our customers. In some cases, that means executing a full-scale core network migration to implement the next generation of resiliency, redundancy, and diversity - positioning our network to meet both today’s needs and tomorrow’s challenges.
This kind of strategic upgrade isn’t just about faster speeds... it’s about building a smarter, more fault-tolerant network. By engineering resiliency, redundancy, and diversity into our core design, we can ensure that service remains stable, even when individual components face failure, strain, or disruption.
This kind of strategic upgrade isn’t just about faster speeds, it’s about building a smarter, more fault-tolerant network. By engineering resiliency, redundancy, and diversity into our core design, we can ensure our service remains stable, even when individual components face failure, strain, or disruption.
Q: Stephen, can you define resiliency and redundancy in the context of a broadband network?
Stephen Harris (COO): “Resiliency is like being punched in the face as a boxer. You can only take so many hits before giving up. It’s about how your routers, switches, and fiber links handle high traffic or physical strain without failing. Redundancy means having more than one of everything. Extra things like extra nodes, cards, ports, or fiber paths, so if one fails, another can take over.”
Q: How do resiliency and redundancy work together to create a more stable and higher availability network?
Stephen: “Redundancy alone isn’t enough if your backups aren't independent, a failure can still propagate and where diversity comes in. If you have duplicate cards in the same node or fiber paths that cross, a single failure can take both out. With true diversity (separate routes, ports, and physical paths) if one link goes down, traffic seamlessly fails over to the other with no impact to customers.”
Q: Can you walk us through an example where redundancy could have prevented a major outage?
Stephen: “We’ve had fiber cuts where our diverse design kicked in - traffic rerouted and customers were none the wiser. Engineers knew something happened, but users didn’t experience a thing.
Why It Matters to You
Q: Why are these principles critical for ISPs today?
Stephen: “Customers expect their service to be up all the time, especially in business or gaming environments where latency and reliability matter most. Resiliency lets the network ‘bounce back’ from issues, while redundancy provides backup before failure. Together, they help mitigate outages and ensure consistent performance by building trust and improving satisfaction.”
Goals & Strategic Design
Q: What were the key goals when designing your new systems?
Stephen: “We had a 5–8-year plan. Ensuring core routers had enough processing power, fiber routes had enough capacity, and the whole design could scale. We chose Cisco gear for its stability and growth roadmap, and engaged outside vendors to validate our choices."
Q: Which KPIs do you monitor to assess network health?
Stephen: “We track data throughput on fiber links, processor load on core routers, and failover performance. These metrics help us catch capacity issues before they become problems and measure uptime improvements.”
Implementing & Monitoring
Q: What systems have you implemented to help with automatic failover, route diversity, and geographic redundancy?
Stephen: “We’ve added Cisco’s watched-route feature, which monitors not just neighbor nodes but the entire network. We’ve built geographic diversity to protect against tornado damage. We also perform routine semi-annual failover tests to ensure backups function seamlessly.”
Q: How do you ensure your team stays on top of these systems?
Stephen: “We’ve trained personnel on network monitoring tools and automation systems. We’re shifting skill sets toward proactive monitoring and quick-response operations, supported by software that can detect and reroute before humans even intervene.”
Cybersecurity
Q: Does resiliency planning include cybersecurity as well?
Stephen: “Absolutely - diverse paths and backups protect not just from hardware failure but also from targeted disruptions. Our design ensures that even if a route is targeted, traffic can shift without dropping service.”
Results & Customer Impact
Q: What improvements can BTC customers expect?
Stephen: “Customers will experience fewer outages, faster recovery from issues and lower latency - especially vital for gamers and businesses. Early signs are promising! Outages have gone unnoticed by end-users, and SLA performance is up.”
Outlook & Innovation Going Forward
Q: What’s next for resiliency in the coming decade?
Stephen: “We're focusing on intelligent automation, autonomous rerouting and self-healing systems. We’re training our team for these tech-driven shifts and continually expanding diversity and capacity stack to stay ahead of disruptions.”
Q: How would you summarize the value of these investments?
Stephen: “It’s simple: resilient, redundant, and diverse infrastructure means reliable, trust-worthy service day in and day out. We built this network correctly - not quickly - and customers can expect a stable, future-proofed experience backed by proactive maintenance and intelligent systems.”
Thanks to the dedication of our team and the completion of recent network upgrades, BTC customers can now enjoy an even more reliable and high-performing connection.
These enhancements reflect our ongoing commitment to delivering world-class service, and you can continue to expect exceptional performance from BTC’s strengthened fiber network.