# Houston, We Have Two Internets… and That’s a Problem?

- Link: https://www.agilicus.com/houston-we-have-two-internets-and-thats-a-problem/
- Published: 2025-08-09T16:30:49+00:00
- Author: Don Bowman

So, you’ve found yourself in a bit of a pickle. Picture this: you’re running a critical
bit of infrastructure, maybe a wastewater treatment plant, a place where the smooth
flow of data is almost as important as the smooth flow of… well, you know. You’ve
got your remote sites all chatting happily with the main plant, sharing all that
lovely SCADA goodness.

Once upon a time, you might have done this with a trusty 900-MHz radio system, a
real workhorse. But then, the airwaves got as crowded as a Boxing Day sale, and 
the interference became a proper nuisance. You looked into upgrading to a 5.8GHz
point-to-point link, but the cost of towers and steel made your wallet weep.

So, like many a sensible person, you turned to the internet. You set up a Virtual
Private Network, and for a while, everything was tickety-boo. Your remote operations
team could connect, your remote historian could slurp up all that juicy data, and
it all funnelled neatly through your big, complicated firewall.

But then, the universe, in its infinite wisdom, decided to throw a spanner in the
works. Maybe it was one too many ice storms, a backhoe with an unfortunate sense
of direction, or just the internet deciding to take an unscheduled holiday. Whatever
the cause, you had outages. Data went missing. People couldn’t get their jobs done.
The grumbling started.

“Right,” you thought, with the determined air of a problem-solver. “I’ve got this.
I’ll get a _second_ internet connection!” A brilliant plan. You go out and get a
shiny new 5G service, or maybe you join the space race with a Starlink dish. You
get it all hooked up.

And that’s when you discover your brilliant plan has created a brilliant new problem.

How on earth do you actually _use_ this thing? It has a completely different IP 
address. What’s the plan? Do you fiddle with your DNS records and then wait four
hours for the Time To Live to expire while the world burns? That’s not going to 
cut it. The folks on the outside trying to connect in won’t have a clue how to find
you.

Worse yet, that shiny new connection might not even support your VPN because it 
doesn’t allow for inbound connections. It doesn’t have a public-facing IP address.
It’s like having a second front door that only opens from the inside. Not terribly
useful.

Now, before you start tearing your hair out and pricing out a return to carrier 
pigeons, take a deep breath. I’ve got another, much simpler, solution.

My company, Agilicus, has built a rather clever zero-trust secure access platform.
One of the neatest tricks up its sleeve is how it handles connectivity. It’s outbound-
only, meaning you never have to worry about opening holes in your firewall.

More importantly for our current predicament, it provides active-active high availability.
In plain English, it uses _all_ of your internet links, all the time. It’s constantly
sending probes down every connection. If one of them goes down – whether it’s your
main fibre line or your fancy new satellite dish – nobody even notices. The traffic
just seamlessly continues flowing over the working links. It just keeps working.
No fuss, no muss.

You don’t need to get tangled up in an expensive and complex Software-Defined Wide
Area Network solution to stitch everything together. Our system uses outbound-only
connections over TLS (Transport Layer Security), which is the same technology that
secures your online banking. It’s simple, secure, and it just works.

If this sounds like the answer to your dual-internet urges, I’d love to chat.