The present invention is a system and method for failing over from a current network access medium to an alternative network access medium. A customer premises equipment (CPE) box has ports for connections to a network through several network access media, such as high speed cable connections, DSL connections and dial-up connections. QoS parameters for each of the connections are monitored from a bandwidth manager remote from the CPE box. When it is determined that a fail-over would be beneficial, a message is sent from the bandwidth manager to the CPE box containing a command to fail-over and an identity of the alternate network access media.