Losing 2 days of work because I skipped the $50 backup router

Our office internet dropped Monday morning around 9 AM. Modem looked fine, lights all blinking, but zero connection. ISP said it would be 48 hours before a tech could swing by. We run a booking system for 6 crews, so that meant answering calls with paper and pen, telling clients we'd call them back. Lost about $2,800 in admin time and rebooking headaches. Found out later a simple $50 LTE backup router with a prepaid SIM would have kept us online the whole time. Now I have one sitting in the server closet, plugged in and ready. Has anyone else gotten burned by not having a failover option, or is that just my cheap stubbornness?

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patricia_singh816d ago

A 48 hour wait from the ISP is pretty normal actually, so the backup router is the real fix here, not just a nice to have. The part people get wrong is thinking the LTE box kicks in on its own. Most of them need to be set up as a failover with a health check pinging something like 8.8.8.8, otherwise it just sits there while your main line is dead. And a prepaid SIM can run dry or get throttled right when you need it, so check the data cap before you trust it. The other thing is your booking system, if that lives on a local server it may still be unreachable from the outside even with the backup, so test the failover before the next outage hits. Cheap stubbornness is usually the reason these never get bought, so at least that part is behind you.

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