How Much Does a Business Internet Backup Solution Actually Cost?

What Causes Business Internet to Go Out?

Business internet outages are rarely planned ahead of time. They arrive as a sudden dropped call or a spinning wheel on a payment screen, and they’re caused by a range of disruptions that are mostly out of your control: 

• Carrier outages and fiber cuts, caused by a construction crew digging in the wrong place, a storm, or a network failure at the carrier level. 
• Hardware failure, caused by power surges and aging equipment. 
• Weather events like high winds, ice, lighting, and flooding often cause damage to lines and equipment. 
• Human error, like misconfigurations, accidental cable damage, and maintenance windows. 

Most of the causes are completely outside your business’s control. You can’t prevent them, but you can prepare for them. 

How to Calculate the Cost of Downtime Per Hour?

Before you decide if backup internet for businesses is worth it, it helps to put a number on what downtime actually costs. Here’s how to calculate the cost of downtime per hour:

1. Start by multiplying the number of affected employees by their average hourly rate. Multiply this number by the length of the downtime. A team of 40 people with an average hourly rate of $35/hour costs $1,400 per hour in idle payroll time. 
2. Next, figure out the amount of lost revenue with this formula: downtime cost per hour = Annual Revenue / Business Hours Per Year. Say your business does $1,000,000 in annual revenue and is open 2,000 hours per year: $1,000,000 / 2,000 = $500 per hour. 
3. In addition to payroll and lost revenue, you also have overhead expenses that continue, such as SaaS, rent, and utilities. Add those to your total. For this example, we’ll use $250 / hour.
4. Add the three numbers together. Multiply that by the number of hours of your most significant outage. If your internet was out for 6 hours, that’s a cost of ($1,400 + $500 + $250)  X 6 = $12,900. 

How Does Internet Downtime Hurt Small Businesses?

Small businesses feel outages more acutely than large businesses, and here’s why: 

• No redundancy cushion: Big companies have IT teams and multiple connections. Small businesses often run on a single line, so when it goes down, everything stops. 
• Every hour is revenue: For a small shop, an hour offline is an hour of lost sales, bookings, or billable work. 
• Customer trust is fragile: Small businesses win customers over with reliability and personal service. A single outage that leaves customers unable to pay or reach you can send them to a competitor. 
• Less capacity to absorb the hit: A large company can easily absorb a few lost hours. For a small business, that loss can be the difference between a profitable month and a tight one. 

Common Problems When Business Internet Goes Out

When the internet goes out, businesses often run into these problems:

• Payment terminals stop working, which can stop sales entirely. 
• Phone systems that rely on the internet go down too.
• Cloud apps like email, inventory, scheduling, accounting, and customer records stop working. 
• Remote and hybrid teams lose access to the systems they need to work.
• Customers become frustrated because they can’t reach you. 

How Does Business Backup Internet Work?

Business internet backup solutions offer a secondary connection that automatically takes over when your primary line fails. The goal is a seamless failover where your team and customers don’t even notice the switch. It typically works like this:

1. You purchase two internet lines, ideally from different carriers, and connect them to your router or gateway. You’ll need equipment that has failover capabilities and can handle multiple WAN connections. 
2. If your primary connection is down, your backup connection takes over. You and your customers should barely notice the difference. 
3. When your primary line starts working again, the gateway or router will automatically switch back. 

What Are the Benefits of Backup Internet for Business?

• Downtime of almost zero: Transactions, calls, and cloud access keep working even when your primary connection is down. 
• Peace of mind: You stop worrying about the “what if” and get back to running your business. 
• Protects revenue: Every hour you stay online is revenue you keep. 
• Low cost: A cellular failover plan costs a fraction of a second fiber line. Plus, it’s far cheaper than the revenue lost during a single outage. 
• Fast recovery: When the primary connection returns, the system switches back automatically. 
• Better customer experience: Customers are able to contact you or make purchases, even when your primary connection is down. 

What Types of Businesses Benefit the Most from Backup Internet?

While nearly every business benefits from business internet backup solutions, some rely on connectivity more than others, including: 

• Retail stores and restaurants: Without the internet, card payments and point-of-sale systems don’t function. 
• Medical and dental clinics: Patient records, scheduling, and telehealth all need an internet connection. 
• Professional services: Law firms, accounting, and consulting firms rely heavily on email and cloud apps. 
• Small businesses: Small businesses often have less of a financial cushion to absorb the losses. A single outage can majorly impact the business. 

Essentially, if your business stops making money when the internet is down, you need a backup solution. 

How Hard Is It to Set Up and Scale?

One of the best things about modern backup internet is how easy it is to deploy and how well it scales as you grow. A hybrid setup with a cellular failover router can usually be installed and configured in a day, and often less. Once configured, failover runs on its own without IT staff managing it. 

Backup internet is easy to scale too, especially with a wireless connection.  If your business is adding another location, you can easily deploy the same setup. If your team has increased bandwidth needs, you can upgrade to a plan with a higher capacity.