Tomorrow I start making the necessary changes in our network infrastructure to move us from a 1.1Mb DSL line to our newly installed FIOS service. It’s going to be nice to go from 1.1Mb to 25/25Mb. I’m particularly looking forward to the ability to do legitimate remote/off-site backups. Right now all backups are held in the same physical location (address). There are multiple copies on multiple machines but now to be able to add an off-site location will ensure a more complete solution.

I have been using FIOS at home for a couple of years now and it has been very reliable and ultra fast. We will be using a Soekris net5501 for the router/firewall at the office. Saturating that 25Mb line requires a pretty robust router. I had to move from a 4501 at home to a 5501 at home for for that reason, the 4501 just couldn’t keep up on large sustained downloads.

Besides the backups the speed increase is really going to make a difference in our mail services. We use Google Apps for our mail back-end (superior spam filtering) and everyones clients are set for IMAP access to the Google servers. Multiple users all doing IMAP to a remote server can be tedious. Now it should be insignificant.

I’ll be back with a follow-up in the future and report the results.