In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:

〉What can you do to keep your business running when your Internet connection suddenly fails you?

〉Why you should consider getting a second internet connection such as an ADSL connection or NBN connection.

〉Why you should consider having a 4g backup connection.

 

 

Transcript:

In this episode of The Power Up Project, we're going to be talking about how to keep your business running when the internet fails.

Welcome back to The Power Up Project. I'm your host Ben Love and today we're going to be talking about how to keep your business running when your internet connection fails. You see, we had a hell of a week last week. One of the major upstream internet providers, we don't know who at this stage, could have been APT, or Vocus, or Telstra or one of those, had a fairly major outage in some equipment somewhere.

Which meant that quite a few of our clients were impacted with either a total internet outage, or in some cases the internet was still kind of working but kind of really not. In either case, some of those clients coped better than others with that particular internet outage. That really can depend in a lot of cases on the nature of the business that is being done. Some businesses are very time critical and depend on that internet connection. Other businesses, you know it wasn't such of an issue to be offline for a couple of hours.

What do you do when your business suffers an internet outage like that? What would the impact be on your clients, on your staff, on your productivity? Would it make a big impact or would it really not? Could you go and have a coffee and just wait for it all to pass by?

If you do need to really keep that internet connection going because your business really does depend on it, and those outages can cost you a lot of money, or a lot of goodwill with your clients; you really need to have a backup internet connection. It really is as simple as that.

That backup internet connection could be your mobile phone, for example. You could tether your laptop to your mobile phone hot spot and keep working that way. We certainly have a lot of clients who do that and not just small clients, but big clients too with a significant head count who use that method. It works very well.

That's particularly useful when some or all their services are up in the cloud, because it doesn't matter how they connect to the internet to get to them or where they connect to it from.

Some other options you might like to consider for that continuity piece for your internet there, you could get a second internet connection into the building such as a ADSL connection or maybe an NBN connection. The thing you need to keep in mind when you're dealing with internet connections like that is that they all come into the building via a physical cable.

A lot of the times when you do lose that primary internet connection, it can be because there has been some physical damage to the cable coming into your building. You might have some roadwork going on down the street, or you might have some linesmen doing some work on the cables and maybe a backhoe or bobcat has accidentally dug through some cables.

If your primary internet connection and your secondary internet connection both come in on cables through that same hole in the ground, there's a fair chance that both of those internet connections are going to be offline while those cables get repaired. That really doesn't do you much good, does it?

Probably one of the best options we're seeing at the moment is 4G, leaning on the mobile phone networks for that internet connectivity. As I said, you can certainly hotspot to a mobile phone. You can get standalone 4G routers, which are separate little devices.