There are many requirements, benefits and risks to consider when choosing which wide area network (WAN) connection method to use in order to connect our Stone network to Stoke's current infrastructure . First, we needed to determine where it would be best to use WAN connections on our network. Through much discussion, we concluded that it would be best to incorporate two WAN connections within our Stone network to reconnect us to the main infrastructure. We made this decision due to the nature of the business, as it is necessary to have 100% uptime as any network outage could have major consequences. The type of cabling we will be implementing is a point to bridge leased line to our main router, which will have a direct connection to the Stoke site, which will provide internet over the line to the Stone site. We will also provide pay-as-you-go fiber optic internet on our backup router. This will be used as a backup connection in the event of a breakdown of our main leased line or network traffic overload. By doing this it allows us to have redundancy on our network if for example the internet connection goes down in Stoke we can start providing our own internet connection. We have chosen to use a point-to-point leased line as it will provide the speed and bandwidth we need to support the large amounts of data being sent between the Stone site and Stoke. Our paid fiber optic line should support similar speeds to the main connection. Because it will provide a redundant connection to the main infrastructure when the main leased line experiences an outage. We will not run this connection until it is needed because it is expensive to operate. The reason we chose to use a leased connection...... middle of paper ...... installation costs will be high, due to cabling possibly being laid. After the one-time installation costs, there will be monthly costs for both connections. Within the core network, we will need to use first hop redundancy protocols. These protocols will protect our default gateway, using both routers and WAN connections. Using these protocols, if one of our routers or a WAN connection went down within seconds, the second router and WAN connection would take over the IP address and become the default router, until we can get the first router, which would have our leased line connection restored and operational. After reviewing the different redundancy protocols available, we decided to use the Hot Standby routing protocol. We chose this because it will allow us to have both of our routers and use the protocol to automatically switch over if something goes wrong..