Ask any business owner whether their internet has ever gone down and you get the same tired laugh. Of course it has. Fiber gets cut, equipment fails, the carrier has a bad afternoon, a contractor puts a backhoe through something two streets away.
What is surprising is how few businesses have decided in advance what happens next. The outage is not the interesting part. The plan is.
An Outage Is Not an IT Problem
It is worth being precise about what actually stops when the circuit drops, because the list is longer than people expect:
- Your phones, if you are on VoIP — which you almost certainly are
- Card payments, at the terminal and online
- Your booking, ordering, or scheduling system, which is somebody else’s website now
- Email, files, and anything else in Microsoft 365
- Your team’s ability to do literally any of their jobs
The phones are the part that hurts most. Customers who cannot reach you do not assume you have an ISP problem. They assume you are closed.
“We Have Two Circuits” Is Not Always Two Circuits
Plenty of businesses pay for a second internet connection from a second provider and reasonably believe they are covered. Sometimes they are. Often they are not, for a reason that only becomes visible when both go down together.
Two providers frequently share the same physical path into your building, the same conduit down your street, or the same regional infrastructure upstream. The billing is independent. The fiber is not. One backhoe, both circuits.
Cellular is genuinely independent of the wire coming into your street. That is the entire point of it as a backup.
The Backup Router in the Closet Problem
The other common arrangement is a spare LTE router sitting in a closet, bought after the last bad outage, waiting for someone to plug it in.
Consider what that actually requires. Someone has to notice the outage. Someone has to know the router exists. That person has to be on site, has to find it, has to know what to unplug and what to plug in, and has to do all of it correctly during the ten minutes of the day when everyone is asking them why the phones are dead.
In practice this takes anywhere from twenty minutes to never.
What Working Failover Looks Like
Failover only counts if it happens without anybody noticing. That means three things have to be true before the outage starts:
The cellular connection is already live
Provisioned, connected, tested, and sitting there doing nothing until it is needed. Not a SIM in a drawer.
The router decides, not a person
An SD-WAN router monitors the primary circuit continuously and moves traffic when it degrades or drops. No ticket, no phone call, no instructions taped to the wall.
Somebody is watching
A failover event should generate an alert to whoever manages your IT, so the problem is already being worked before you think to report it. Silent failover is good. Silent failover that nobody knows about is how you discover three weeks later that you have been running on cellular the whole time.
It Is Cheaper Than the Thing It Prevents
Work out what an hour offline costs you at your busiest time of day. Then compare that with what a router and a cellular plan cost per month. For most businesses the arithmetic stops being interesting very quickly — which is why we build it into every site we manage rather than offering it as an upgrade.
How Long Could You Run Without the Internet?
We will look at your circuits, your equipment, and what actually happens today when the primary goes down.