In the event of a primary network access outage the VPN Gateway can be profiled to automatically switch to Dial Backup. To do this, the VPN Gateway needs to be aware when IP connectivity over the WAN connection is lost. The VPN Gateway continuously monitors the status of the WAN connection using one of two tests. The first test periodically sends test DNS requests (for the name “www.att.com”) to verify that the WAN connection is still active. The second test sends a request to the AT&T Configuration Servers.