Lessons learned from recent internet service provider outages

In early 2021, thousands of people and businesses in the Northeast were left without internet service, or at least a degradation of service, for most of the day when a major ISP’s service mysteriously went down. According to the company, service interruption was reported from widespread areas, including Boston, New York City, Washington DC, and more.

Although service was restored the same day, there is no doubt that this event impacted a wide number of small and medium businesses (as well as large enterprise companies), and made them realize just how much of their business is driven by the need for internet access – whether that’s receiving orders online, accepting credit card transactions through their POS systems, or interacting with its online customer base. Additionally, the company still isn’t sure what caused the widespread outage, nor will this be the last service interruption from a major ISP.

This outage is just one of the latest examples of the potential vulnerabilities of an ISPs service, and it’s a wake-up call to many businesses that they need to have failover systems in place so they don’t experience any downtime during future outages or service degradations.

The High Cost of Downtime

The direct and indirect costs of internet downtime are immediate when businesses are unable to process POS (point-of-sale) transactions, reach business applications, or use VoIP and email.

According to Cisco, internet downtime costs SMB businesses between $8,580 and $74,000 per hour—when you consider lost revenue, reduced employee productivity, and decreased customer satisfaction from down systems. Another company survey indicated that 68% of their business customers did not have a redundant internet connection at all locations.

With EPIC iO, businesses receive the peace of mind of always being on the internet through our 4G LTE and evolving 5G Internet Failover Service. Wireless provides a diverse path to the internet that cannot be cut by construction, fallen trees, or natural disasters. To ensure maximum uptime, EPIC iO works with businesses to design solutions pre-engineered with the best carrier and strongest signal at every location.

As a result of the recent outage and other ISP issues with their customers, an EPIC iO partner realized his clients with EPIC iO’s Failover solution did not experience downtime during the outages. The company plans to sign new customers to longer, multi-year failover contracts that protect their business against costly internet downtime. Below are some additional benefits of FaaST:

  • Fast deployment
  • Automatic failover protection
  • No on-site action required
  • Continuous operations with access to mission-critical applications
  • Maintain network availability while managing costs
  • No additional hardware or programming required
  • Alarms and reporting are distributed to administrators for each failover instance

In fact, customers who are taking advantage of our Failover service haven’t experienced any downtime due to major ISP failures. Having the ability to seamlessly and automatically switch to a cellular connection with their main provider in case of connection issues has ensured that businesses operate continuously, restoring the owner's time and revenue that they would inevitably have to deal with outside of EPIC iO’s FaaST offering.

Internet downtime can have disastrous effects on your business, especially as more organizations rely on cloud applications and online stores to drive revenue. Learn more about EPIC iO’s Failover by visiting our Business Continuity solutions page, or contact an EPIC iO expert to get started today!

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