# Planning a second ISP handover

A single handover is a single point of failure. A second one, in a different place, is what keeps an ISP running when a site, a carrier or a maintenance window takes the first one away.

5 June 2026

[ISP & Network Operators](https://netavo.com/insights)

## What a second handover protects against

A second handover is not simply more capacity. It is protection against a specific set of failures, and it is worth being clear about which ones. A diverse second site guards against the loss of a datacentre, a fault in one access or transport path, and planned maintenance that would otherwise be a customer-visible outage. It does that only to the extent that the second site is genuinely independent of the first, in geography, in the carriers it uses, and in the facilities and power that support it.

The questions to ask of any second handover are about independence, not just presence. Two ports in the same building, or two circuits down the same duct, add capacity but not resilience. The value is in the separation.

## Sizing each site to stand alone

If the point of the second site is to survive the loss of the first, then each site has to carry the traffic alone, or a defined, agreed, degraded level of it. That is a capacity decision made at design time, not something to discover during an incident. Plan each handover with headroom for the busy hour with the other site down, and decide in advance what, if anything, is shed when you are running on one site.

Netavo offers handover at Telehouse North and Telehouse East in London and at Pulsant Manchester, on 1G, 10G and 100G ports, so a second handover can sit in a different city on an independent path. Capacity, routing and failover behaviour are designed with your engineers around your own network, and the specific carrier diversity for your sites is confirmed as part of that design. London and Manchester sit on separate paths in Netavo's core, so a second handover in the other city is diverse at the core as well as in geography.

## Common questions

### Where can I take a second handover from Netavo?

Netavo offers handover at Telehouse North and Telehouse East in London and at Pulsant Manchester, on 1G, 10G and 100G ports, so a second site can be in a different city.

### Does a second circuit automatically give me resilience?

No. Two circuits add capacity, but they only add resilience if they are genuinely independent in geography, carrier and facility. Diversity has to be designed and evidenced, not assumed.

### How much capacity should each handover have?

Enough to carry your busy-hour traffic with the other site unavailable, or an agreed degraded level. Plan single-site operation at design time rather than during an incident.

## Related services

### [ISP Network Services](https://netavo.com/services/isp)

IP transit, backhaul and L2TP broadband for internet service providers and network operators.

### [Connectivity & WAN](https://netavo.com/services/connectivity)

Fibre and Ethernet access, private WAN and resilient connectivity, from a single site to a national estate.

## Designing a resilient handover?

Tell us where your sites are and what you need to survive a single-site failure, and an engineer will work through the options with you.

[Work with us](https://netavo.com/work-with-us)

Source: https://netavo.com/insights/second-isp-handover