Broadband down? Work through this.

Fastest first: tether your phone — turn on its hotspot and connect your computer to it. That takes minutes and comfortably carries email, card machines and video calls, though it eats mobile data. Next step up is a 4G/5G router with a data SIM, which puts the whole premises back online and, kept afterwards, becomes automatic failover for next time. And if there’s no usable mobile signal or the outage is running into days, that’s what our emergency internet service exists for.

On a home (residential) line, often yes — and it should be automatic. Ofcom’s scheme does not cover business broadband, so on a business line check the fix times and any compensation in your contract. Under Ofcom’s automatic compensation scheme, providers that have signed up (including BT, EE, Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Vodafone and Plusnet, among others) pay a fixed amount per day when a total loss of service isn’t fixed within two full working days of you reporting it — currently £10.34 a day, credited to your bill without you having to claim. The rates rise periodically and not every provider is in the scheme, so check yours. It applies to the line being down, not to slow WiFi inside your home.

Plug a laptop directly into the router with a network cable. If that works, your line is fine and you have a WiFi or internal network problem. If it does not, look at the router’s broadband or DSL light — if it is off or flashing, the fault is on the line rather than inside your building. Then check your provider’s status page for a declared area fault before you spend an hour on hold.

On copper and part-fibre lines, repeated disconnections are interpreted as an unstable line, and the network automatically makes it slower in exchange for stability. That reduction can persist long after the original fault is fixed. Restart it once as a genuine test, then stop — you can permanently slow your own connection by rebooting it repeatedly.

Ask for the fault reference, ask what care level the line is on and what fix time that commits them to, and ask whether there is a declared area fault. The care level question is the one people miss and it is the one that tells you whether you are waiting hours or working days — standard care targets end of the second working day and excludes weekends and bank holidays.

Usually yes. Most modern card readers can fall back to a mobile network by themselves, so check yours rather than assuming the worst. What is more likely to break is cloud-based till software, which often keeps taking orders offline but loses reporting and stock until it reconnects. Know your card acquirer’s authorisation phone line as a final fallback.