// BUSINESS CONTINUITY · BROADBAND
A broadband emergency plan, written before you need it
The worst time to work out what you do when the internet dies is while it is dead. This is the plan we build with businesses — what breaks, how long you can survive it, who does what, and at exactly what point you stop waiting and start acting. It is useful whether or not you ever call us.
Rated 4.9 on GoogleFamily-run since 1995 · no fix, no fee/01 — FIRST, THE HONEST BIT
Buy the failover router first. We mean it.
If you take one thing from this page: for most businesses, the correct first line of defence is an automatic 4G or 5G failover router, not a plan to phone somebody.
It sits alongside your existing router, notices the line has failed, and moves your traffic onto mobile data within seconds — unattended, at three in the morning, on Boxing Day. It costs a few hundred pounds plus a small monthly data cost. Nothing that involves a human being and a vehicle competes with that.
We fit them. We would rather fit you one and never hear from you in an emergency than sell you a more exciting service that recovers you more slowly.
Two things to check before you buy one, though: what the mobile coverage is actually like at your premises (not on a coverage map), and whether your systems will tolerate arriving on a different internet address — some card portals, banking systems and sign-in rules check that. Both are things we test as part of building the plan.
/02 — WHAT BREAKS
Step one: what actually breaks?
Every plan starts here, and almost every plan we are shown skips it and starts with equipment instead.
Go activity by activity and write down what stops. It is nearly always more than people expect:
- Cloud till and booking systems — many keep taking orders offline, but you lose reporting, stock and often the ability to look anything up. Find out exactly what your own system does offline before the day you need to know.
- Card payments — usually more resilient than people fear, since most modern readers fall back to mobile networks. Check yours anyway.
- Phones — if they run over broadband, they go with it. After the analogue switch-off, currently set for 31 January 2027, that will be almost everybody.
- Anything cloud-based — email, files, accounts, practice management, design tools, the lot.
- Door entry, CCTV, alarms and remote monitoring — routinely forgotten until they are needed.
Then put your own number on it. Not a number off the internet. If you search for the cost of downtime you will find “£3,000 an hour” and similar figures repeated across dozens of sites — they trace back through a chain of marketing articles to a study from 2014, and they were survey estimates rather than measured losses. Yours is: staff cost per hour times people who cannot work, plus transactions you cannot take, plus anything with a deadline. It takes twenty minutes and it is the number that decides everything else.
/03 — THE PLAN ITSELF
What a proper written procedure contains
We build these using standard business-continuity language, because it makes the document something your insurer, your auditor and a serious customer will recognise rather than a leaflet.
- How long you can tolerate it and how fast you need it back — agreed per activity, in writing, by you and not by us.
- Objective triggers. Not “when it feels bad”. Real ones: total loss confirmed at the router for more than X minutes; the provider has given a fault reference and no estimate; the estimate exceeds your recovery target. Written down, so a junior member of staff can act at 7am without ringing the owner.
- Named roles, each with a named deputy. Incident lead, communications, technical, and payments. Deputies matter because outages do not wait for everyone to be in.
- A contact tree with the provider’s fault line, account number, circuit ID, care level, the exact wording to use, our out-of-hours number, the card acquirer’s authorisation line, and the phone system provider.
- An escalation ladder with clocks: 15 minutes confirm and log; 30 minutes fault raised and reference obtained; 1 hour fallback measures live; 2 hours decide on external support; 4 hours decide on relocating.
- The manual fallbacks, written out and printed — how to take a payment, how to record a booking, where the paper is. A plan stored only in the cloud is a plan you cannot read during the outage.
/04 — REHEARSE IT
Then unplug it on purpose
This is the step everyone skips and it is the one that makes the difference.
Pick a quiet hour, pull the broadband out deliberately, and run the procedure. You will find things: the failover works but the card machine doesn’t reconnect; the phone divert takes fifteen minutes nobody had allowed for; the person named in the plan left last year; the printed contact sheet is a PDF in a cloud drive you cannot now reach.
Better to find all that on a Tuesday morning of your choosing than on the worst day of your year. A plan nobody has ever tested is a document, not a capability.
We do this with customers annually, and it takes about an hour.
/05 — WHERE THE VAN FITS
Where our van fits into this
Second line. Deliberately.
Automatic failover handles the common case — a few hours, decent mobile coverage, business as usual. The van is what you call when failover is not enough:
- Poor mobile coverage, so there is nothing to fail over to.
- A long outage — days rather than hours, which standard repair timescales permit more often than people realise.
- A power cut as well, or an unusable building. The van is solar-powered and off-grid, so it brings its own electricity. A failover router in a dark building does nothing.
- A need for real bandwidth — a full office, an event, or large files that must move today.
If your plan names us, we will already know your network, your firewall, whether your systems tolerate a different internet address, and where the van can legally park. That preparation is most of the value, and it is why this works far better agreed in advance than improvised.
One honest limit, stated plainly: we have one van. If it is committed elsewhere we will say so immediately rather than leave you hoping. Any plan that depends on us also has a fallback that does not.
FAMILY-RUN SINCE 1995 · ★ 4.9 ON GOOGLE · 200+ COMPUTERS UNDER OUR CARE · NO FIX, NO FEE · SAME-DAY REMOTE SUPPORT
// GOOD QUESTIONS
Frequently asked
Should my small business have backup internet?
If an internet outage stops you taking card payments, answering calls or reaching cloud systems — and after the analogue phone switch-off that will describe most businesses — then yes. The maths is rarely close: an automatic 4G/5G failover router costs a few hundred pounds plus a modest monthly SIM, against a standard repair window that legitimately allows a Friday-afternoon fault to run to Tuesday. Start with the failover router, write the plan on this page, and rehearse it once. That combination covers the overwhelming majority of outages for less than one bad day costs.
What should a broadband emergency plan actually contain?
An analysis of what breaks in your business without connectivity, how long you can tolerate each thing being down, objective written triggers for acting, named roles each with a deputy, a contact tree including your provider’s fault line and your line’s care level, an escalation ladder with timings, and printed manual fallbacks. Then a rehearsal, because an untested plan is a document rather than a capability.
Is a 4G failover router better than calling someone out?
For most businesses, yes, and we will say so even though it earns us less. A failover router switches over in seconds, unattended, at any hour, for a few hundred pounds plus a modest monthly data cost. A mobile response cannot match that recovery time. Failover is the wrong answer only where mobile coverage is poor, where you lose power too, where the outage runs into days, or where you need serious bandwidth.
How much does business downtime really cost?
Far less predictably than the internet suggests. The widely-quoted per-hour figures trace back through marketing articles to a study from 2014 and are survey estimates rather than measured losses. The number worth having is your own: staff cost per hour times the people who cannot work, plus transactions you cannot take, plus anything with a deadline attached. It takes about twenty minutes to work out and it is the figure that should drive your decision.
Will the phone switch-off in 2027 affect my business?
Almost certainly. The old analogue telephone network is being retired, with the current industry date of 31 January 2027, after which phone services run over broadband. From then, a broadband fault takes your telephones with it — so anything that depended on the phone line still working during an internet outage needs rethinking. It is the single best reason to write a plan this year rather than next.
Shall we build yours?
We will walk your business, work out what genuinely breaks and how long you can stand it, fit the right failover kit, and leave you with a written procedure your staff can follow when you are not there. Then we will test it with you.
01202 775566 · help@365techies.co.uk · MON–FRI 9AM–5PM