FirstDigital is connecting more buildings and businesses across the Intermountain West to its fiber network, helping them build greater network redundancy while supporting Wide Area Network (WAN) modernization for increasingly connected operations.

This year, FirstDigital has expanded into more new buildings across Utah and Arizona, giving businesses inside direct access to a fiber network designed with diverse paths and more ways to keep operations running when a single connection fails.

Building Redundancy Into the Fiber Network

A redundant fiber network is designed to reduce reliance on a single connection or path. Depending on an organization’s requirements and available infrastructure, additional connectivity can provide another route if the primary connection is disrupted.

“Connectivity isn’t just an IT concern anymore,” says Alex Jackson, Chief Operating Officer of FirstDigital. “When the network goes down, phones stop ringing, payments stop processing, and employees stop working.”

For larger organizations in particular, network availability can be critical to day-to-day operations. Relying on a single connection or path can create a potential point of failure when employees, customers, applications, and business systems depend on reliable connectivity.

How Redundancy Keeps Operations Running

FirstDigital builds redundancy into its network from the building entrance to the internet. It uses multiple routes to geographically diverse internet points of presence, each served by separate network equipment, so the failure of a single path or device does not take customers offline.

FirstDigital works with each customer to design around those risks rather than fitting them into a standard package. This can mean

• physically diverse fiber paths into a facility,
• a FirstDigital connection paired with a secondary path, or
• intelligent traffic management that automatically shifts critical applications to a healthy path if one link fails.

Where a facility requires it, FirstDigital can also build diverse building entrances separated by at least 25 feet, protecting against a single construction cut or conduit failure.

Secure Providers and Peering

Beyond its own network, FirstDigital connects to multiple Tier 1 internet providers and maintains direct peering with more than 200 networks, including major cloud, content, and carrier providers. These connections give customer traffic multiple paths to the applications they rely on and keep traffic off congested intermediate routes.

Modern Solutions for Today’s Business Needs

FirstDigital’s modernized core network gives customer traffic multiple parallel paths, so a single equipment or link failure doesn’t interrupt service, and capacity can be added as demand grows. For organizations that need an additional layer of protection, FirstDigital can pair fiber with a secondary connection that includes managed traffic steering to keep critical applications online if one path fails.

Redundancy is also part of a larger shift in how organizations approach network infrastructure. Traditional hub-and-spoke WAN architectures were designed around environments where branch locations commonly routed traffic through a central office or data center. Today, employees and facilities may access cloud applications, data, and other resources from multiple locations.

Those changes can create new requirements for bandwidth, cloud connectivity, resiliency, and flexibility. For organizations still relying on older network architectures, legacy WAN modernization can help align connectivity with the way people, locations, and applications operate today.

Customer Success is Our Success

Organizations have already chosen FirstDigital because redundancy is a key part of their network strategy.

Financial institutions in both Utah and Arizona rely on us to keep their banking systems and member calls running without interruption. Both use FirstDigital fiber as their primary internet path, paired with secondary connections that work together to steer traffic automatically so critical applications always have the best available path if one fails or degrades. One VP of IT says the design has given him enough confidence in the network that he can now vacation beyond cell coverage without worrying about whether his branches are online.

A multi-location tire and auto service business uses the same approach for different stakes: an outage means missed service calls and card payments that can’t be processed. With FirstDigital fiber backed by secondary connections, calls keep coming in, and transactions keep processing even if a primary connection goes down.

Supporting Growing Needs Across the Intermountain West

FirstDigital helps organizations in Utah, Arizona, and Idaho modernize their networks with dedicated fiber, Ethernet, and cloud connectivity. These services support organizations seeking business fiber internet that meets growing bandwidth and resiliency requirements.

“Our customers are treating resiliency as an operational decision, and we’re building our network to support that,” says Jackson.

If you’re evaluating legacy WAN infrastructure, modernization does not necessarily mean adopting a single technology. The right approach depends on how your business uses its network today, where vulnerabilities or limitations exist, and what its operations will require going forward. Connect with our team to discuss your next steps toward more reliability today.