In early 2021, thousands of people and businesses in the Northeast were left without internet service, or at least a degradation of service, for a majority 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 systems being down.Another company survey indicated that 68% of their business customers did not have a redundant internet connection at all of their locations.
With Broad Sky Networks, businesses receive the peace-of-mind of always-on 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, Broad Sky 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, a Broad Sky partner realized his clients with Broad Sky’s Failover solution did not experience downtime during the outages. The company now plans to sign new customers to longer, multi-year term failover contracts that protect their business against costly internet downtime.Below are some additional benefits to 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 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 in the event of connection issues with their main provider has ensured that businesses operate continuously,restoring the owners time and revenue that they would inevitably have to deal with outside of Broad Sky’s FaaST offering.
Internet downtime can have disastrous effects on your business, especially as more and more organizations are relying on cloud applications and online stores to drive revenue. Learn more about Broad Sky’s Failover by visiting our Business Continuity solutions page, or reach out to a Broad Sky expert to get started today!