// 365 EMERGENCY INTERNET
Your broadband is down. We bring the internet to you.
Most emergency broadband companies post you a box and hope it arrives tomorrow. We drive a solar-powered, off-grid van to your premises and give you a genuinely fast satellite connection — over WiFi or wired into your network. It needs no mains power and no working infrastructure, because the van carries its own. Family-run in Bournemouth since 1995.
Rated 4.9 on GoogleFamily-run since 1995 · no fix, no fee/01 — WHAT IT IS
What is 365 Emergency Internet?
It is a van. That is the honest short answer, and it is also the whole point.
The 365 Crafter is our mobile support vehicle. It carries a Victron off-grid power system — a Cerbo GX running Venus OS, solar charging, a lithium battery bank, a SmartShunt and a DC-DC charger — and a satellite internet terminal running on a Starlink Business Priority service. It is a real working vehicle we already run our business from, not a demonstrator built for a brochure.
We park it near your premises, put the dish where it can see the sky, and hand you a connection — either as WiFi for your staff and devices, or wired properly into your existing network so your normal systems come back.
The thing that makes it different: it needs nothing from your building. No mains power. No working line. No infrastructure at all. A competitor’s emergency router still needs a socket and a building with electricity in it. Ours doesn’t — which matters more than you would think, because a power cut and a broadband fault are different problems and one of them takes the other with it.
Independent. 365 Techies is not affiliated with, endorsed by, authorised by or a reseller for SpaceX or Starlink. We are an IT support firm that uses a Starlink Business Priority service, on a plan whose terms permit providing access to third parties. Starlink is a trademark of Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
/02 — BE HONEST FIRST
Should you actually call us, or buy a failover router?
We are going to answer this before we sell you anything, because the answer is often “not us”.
If your only worry is “what if the broadband goes down for an afternoon”, the right answer is an automatic 4G or 5G failover router. It sits in your comms cupboard, notices the line has gone, and switches to mobile data in seconds — no phone call, no waiting, no one driving anywhere. It costs a few hundred pounds plus a modest monthly data cost, and it works at three in the morning on a bank holiday.
No van, ours or anyone else’s, can beat that recovery time. We are not going to insult you by pretending it can. We fit failover routers, and for most businesses that is what we will recommend first.
So when is the van the right call? Four situations, and they are real:
- Where mobile coverage is poor. Failover only works if there is a mobile signal to fail over to. Across rural Dorset, the Purbecks and plenty of industrial units, there isn’t one worth having. Satellite does not care.
- When the outage runs into days rather than hours. More on that below — the standard repair timescales are worse than most people realise.
- When you have lost power too, or the building is unusable. A failover router in a dark building does nothing at all.
- When you need real bandwidth, not just enough to limp — a room full of people, an event, a live stream, or shifting large files.
That is the honest shape of it. We are the second line, not the first.
/03 — THE REAL TIMESCALES
How long you are actually offline, if you do nothing
This is the part that changes people’s minds, and almost nobody explains it.
UK broadband faults are repaired against care levels, and most business lines are on the standard one. Under standard care, a fault is due to be cleared by end of the second working day after you report it — and that clock excludes weekends and bank holidays.
So a fault reported on Friday afternoon is not due to be fixed until end of Tuesday. Over an Easter or Christmas weekend it stretches further still. That is not a failure of the system; that is the system working as designed.
Two more things worth knowing:
- The regulated target is only 85%. Ofcom’s quality-of-service standards require repair within the timescale for 85% of faults, with 97% within a further five days. Roughly one fault in seven is permitted to miss it entirely.
- The clock stops for things outside their control — waiting on permissions, third-party access, traffic management — and during a declared major outage the timescales effectively suspend. Which is precisely when you most need to be online.
And there is a deadline coming. The old analogue phone network is being switched off, with the current industry date of 31 January 2027. After that your phones run over your broadband. A broadband fault will no longer just cost you email — it will take your telephones with it. If you have not thought about that yet, this is the year to.
/04 — WHAT WE NEED
What we need from your site
What we need from your site — please read this before enquiring. We would rather turn an enquiry down than turn up and fail.
- Somewhere to park the van on private land or with the landowner’s permission, within cable reach of where you need the connection — think tens of metres, not hundreds.
- A clear view of the sky from where the dish sits. Trees in leaf, tall buildings and overhanging structures genuinely break this. If the view is partly blocked we may need up to 24 hours of obstruction mapping before we can tell you honestly whether it will hold up.
- Nothing else. No mains power, no existing connection, no working infrastructure at all — the van is solar-powered and runs off its own lithium battery bank. That is the part most competitors cannot do.
What will disqualify a site: no sky view at all; nowhere legal to park; a need for the connection to reach further than we can safely run cable; or a requirement we cannot honestly meet. We will tell you on the phone, not on the day.
/05 — HOW IT CONNECTS
How we join it to your network, safely
This is the part done badly most often, and it is worth explaining because it is where an emergency fix can quietly become a security incident.
The rule we work to: we hand the connection to your firewall as a second internet feed. We do not plug a strange router into your network switch and create a second doorway into your business. Your firewall stays in charge, your rules still apply, and when the line comes back you simply go back to normal.
If your firewall genuinely cannot take a second feed, the fallback is a completely separate network — our own router, our own addresses, our own WiFi, with no route into your systems at all. That gets your people onto email, cloud apps and the web while your own network stays sealed. We will tell you plainly which of the two you are getting, and what each one does and does not give you back.
Either way: a unique password for your visit, never a shared one reused between customers; guest devices isolated from each other; and modern encryption throughout.
Things we will warn you about before we start, not after: some systems are pinned to your normal internet address — card payment portals, banking, sign-in rules that check where you are connecting from, site-to-site VPNs. Arriving on a different connection can trip those. It is fixable, but it needs to be known in advance, which is exactly why the sensible version of this service is planned before you need it rather than improvised on the worst morning of your year.
/06 — WHEN NOT TO CALL US
When this is not the right answer
When this is not the right answer — and we would rather say so now.
- If you want automatic failover, buy a failover router. A 4G/5G failover router switches over in seconds, unattended, day or night, for a fraction of what a call-out costs. Nothing involving a human being and a vehicle can beat that recovery time, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. We will happily fit you one — that is the honest first answer for most businesses.
- If you need it for months, you need a fixed line or a permanent installation, not a van on your forecourt.
- If you have no view of the sky, satellite will not work. No amount of good intentions changes that.
- If you are an NHS-connected site — a GP practice, community pharmacy or NHS dental practice — your clinical systems reach the NHS over a specific accredited network, and no third party can restore that with an ad hoc link. We will help with your general office connectivity, but we will not claim to put your clinical systems back.
/07 — WHAT IT COSTS
What does it cost?
We are not going to publish a number we have not properly worked out, because the whole site is built on not doing that.
What we can tell you honestly is how it is priced: a call-out for the response itself, and a day rate for planned work like events. If you are an existing support customer, this sits naturally alongside your cover rather than being a separate purchase.
What we will not do is quote you a fear-based figure for what downtime costs. If you search for it you will find “£3,000 an hour” and similar numbers repeated everywhere — they trace back through a chain of marketing blogs to a study from 2014, and they are survey estimates rather than measured losses. We would rather sit down and work out your number from your own figures: staff cost per hour times people blocked, your average transaction value, what you actually cannot do. That number is real and it is usually the one that settles the decision.
Tell us what you need and we will price it properly.
/08 — WHERE WE GO
Where we can get to
We are based in Bournemouth and the van covers Christchurch, Poole, Wimborne, Wareham, Ferndown, Ringwood, the Purbecks and the wider Dorset area, with the New Forest and south-east Hampshire within reach.
An honest limit: we have one van. If it is committed to a booked event, we cannot be in two places at once, and we will tell you that when you call rather than leave you waiting. That is also the single best argument for agreeing a plan in advance if being online genuinely matters to your business.
We carry £10 million public liability cover, underwritten by Hiscox, and can provide the certificate on request — commercial sites, venues and managing agents usually want to see it before letting anyone on site.
Our response times are what we can honestly staff and drive — we will give you a realistic window on the phone. We are not going to publish an SLA we cannot keep with one vehicle.
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
My business broadband is down — what can I do today?
First, confirm it is really the line: check the router lights and your provider’s status page, and try tethering a phone to see whether the problem is the connection or something inside your network. Report the fault and get a reference and an estimated fix time. If that estimate is longer than you can survive, you need a temporary connection — either a 4G/5G router if you have decent mobile coverage, or something like our van if you do not. Call us on 01202 775566 and we will tell you honestly which you need.
How quickly can I get temporary internet for my business?
Most emergency broadband suppliers courier a router to you on a next-working-day basis. Because we are based in Bournemouth and the van is already in the county, we can often be on site the same day within Dorset — subject to the van being free, since we only have one. What we cannot beat is an automatic failover router already installed, which switches over in seconds without anyone doing anything.
Do I need mains power or a working connection for this?
No, and that is the main thing that separates it from a couriered emergency router. The 365 Crafter is genuinely off-grid — solar charging and a lithium battery bank running a Victron system — so it powers itself and the satellite equipment. All we need is somewhere to park within cable reach and a clear view of the sky.
What’s the best backup internet for a small business?
For most small businesses, an automatic 4G or 5G failover router is the right first answer: it switches over in seconds, unattended, and costs a few hundred pounds plus a modest monthly data cost. It is only the wrong answer where mobile coverage is poor, where you also lose power, where an outage runs into days, or where you need serious bandwidth rather than enough to limp. We fit failover routers as well as running the van, so we have no reason to push you towards the more expensive option.
How long does a UK broadband fault usually take to fix?
On the standard care level that most business lines use, a fault is due to be cleared by the end of the second working day after you report it — and that excludes weekends and bank holidays, so a Friday afternoon fault may not be due until end of Tuesday. Ofcom only requires 85% of faults to be repaired within the timescale. During a major outage the timescales effectively suspend.
Is 365 Techies a Starlink dealer?
No. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by or authorised by SpaceX or Starlink, and we do not sell or resell their hardware or subscriptions. We are an IT support firm that uses a Starlink Business Priority service on our own van, on a plan whose terms permit providing access to third parties. If you want to buy your own Starlink kit, buy it from Starlink — and we are happy to install and configure it for you.
Down right now?
Call us on 01202 775566 and we will tell you honestly, on the phone, whether we can help you today and what it will cost. If a failover router is the better answer for you, we will say so.
01202 775566 · help@365techies.co.uk · MON–FRI 9AM–5PM