Broadband
For a virtual team to operate efficiently, all members of the team must be interconnected via broadband internet connections. Typically, broadband access is available to small office and home office locations via cable from a local TV company or via ADSL over a telephone connection. A broadband connection offers down stream bandwidths starting at 512KBits/sec but new providers are pushing this to 4 and even 8MBits/sec.
Improving Broadband Availability
Depending on the reliability of local broadband providers and the requirements of the team for resilient connections to the internet, it may be worth considering getting broadband connections to the office from two independent providers. For example a home office could be equipped with both a cable and an ADSL connection.
How do i do that?
With the use of a Twin WAN Router it is possible to split internet traffic across, for example, a 512KBits/sec cable connection and a 512KBits/sec ADSL connection. In this example giving a potential effective connection speed of 1MBits/sec. Should one of the broadband providers services fail, the router will automatically route all traffic via the surviving connection. Bandwidth will be reduced while the connection is down but resilience against complete internet connection loss has been improved significantly.
An example of a twin lan router is the XiNCOM XC-DPG402.
What about...
...selecting multiple broadband providers? Well if you're going to improve availability you need to ensure that the suppliers you choose use independent equipment and independent cabling to provide their services. Now if you have the choice of a cable and ADSL service then a lot of the infrastructure of the two services is very likely to be independent. However, if you're choosing between multiple ADSL providers then things are less clear. Here in the UK, for example, 99% of ADSL suppliers are selling ADSL services that are actually supplied by BT. Therefore if you choose two ADSL services in the UK to give improved availability, you'll be disappointed.