For most businesses today, the importance of getting connected is only outweighed by the need to stay connected. From professional services relying on their CRM platforms to communicate with clients, to retail businesses needing a stable connection at their Point-of-Sale, a strong connection is required in almost every industry.  

Whether we like it or not, everyone is on the internet and it can be chaos when it goes down — none more so than for businesses. The thing to note is that the effects of a connection drop-out extend far beyond a temporary inability to communicate with staff and clients. For example, in a network drop out, your ability to transfer critical data is compromised, as is your ability to keep your connected devices secure.

A study by Deloitte on the economic impact of disruptions to internet connectivity found that an average of $23.6 million would be lost per 10 million population.   

Luckily, you can mitigate the impact of these outages on your business by installing or retrofitting cellular network access to your modem. This is known as a 4G or 5G failover.  

While 4G/5G failovers are becoming more common and readily available, we’re still surprised by the number of people who are unaware or do not see the value in this extra layer of backup. All too often, business owners don’t see the point in a 4G/5G failover until it’s too late.  

So, to make things a bit clearer, here’s a quick run through of why you should always order 4G/5G failover.  

What is 4G or 5G failover? 

A failover solution backs up your internet connection in the event of a network cut-out.  

4G and 5G failover solutions, unsurprisingly, uses mobile networks to keep you online. This means your modem will not only be able to connect to the internet but can also connect to the same 4G/5G signal as your phone. 

While this is less important for people streaming Netflix on a Saturday night, it’s obviously a big deal for businesses that rely heavily on their internet connection.  

In fact, we’d argue that nearly every business relies heavily on their internet connection – they may just not know to what extent.  

Why is it important? 

Being able to maintain your connection is essential, especially in an era of remote working and collaboration. Still, however, we hear people say things like, “Oh, if it drops out, I’ll just hotspot it”. 

There are a few things wrong with this.  

Firstly, does the rest of the office have internet? Just because you’re working, do the rest of your colleagues have to get their own phones out and hotspot? 

More specifically, if you’re in the middle of a boardroom meeting and your internet cuts out, your hotspot may be able to get your laptop back online, but if you’re connecting to the screen via Wifi, you’re all going to be huddled around someone’s laptop.  

Not really conducive to sealing that deal, is it? 

Printers are another everyday device that will stop working if you try to hotspot a single device when the network goes down. This is a particular concern if your business offers paper receipts, or you have time-sensitive documents that need to be physically signed or sent off.

Beyond this, if you work in retail and your POS system goes down, you’re essentially bleeding money until the connection resumes. Do you force customers to wait in line patiently? Or do you tell them to come back later and potentially lose out on sales? 

On the other hand, a 4G or 5G failover will automatically and seamlessly switch your connection over. In our clients’ experience, their connection is swapped so quickly there is no noticeable interruption.  

Example

We pitched ordering a 4G or 5G failover for one of our clients in professional services. Predictably, there was some hesitation around the cost and questions around whether it really was worth it.  

So, we broke it down like this:  

Let’s say you’re a professional services firm with a staff of 10 billable workers, earning the company an average rate of $150 an hour.  

That means a 1 hour outage costs your business $1,500. A 4G/5G failover on the other hand, starts from $50 per month.   

You do the maths.  

How does it work?

4G failover works by automatically switching your connection over from Wifi to 4G cellular data if your internet connection drops out. These days, the switch over from Wifi to cellular data is so quick, you may not even know you lost connection in the first place.  

To get this extra layer of protection, you can either install a new modem or have the failover connection retrofitted to your existing modem.  

Our experience 

At Monocera, we’re lucky enough to work with a range of different clients across several different industries. This means we’re able to get a pretty good overview of which technologies can augment and optimise businesses of all shapes and sizes.  

Because of this, we can safely say that you should always order 4G failover, regardless of your business.  

A stable internet connection is never guaranteed. Since so much of today’s economy is moving digitally (and not looking to slow down), it only makes sense to give yourself that extra level of protection.  

If you are thinking of securing your connection with a 4G failover, get in contact and we’ll walk you through your options.