Fibre cuts, cable theft, power outages and undersea cable breaks all take businesses offline. How to design connectivity that keeps working when one link fails.
When the internet goes down, so does almost everything else: Microsoft 365, cloud accounting, your phone system, card machines and remote access. Yet many South African offices still run on a single fibre line and hope for the best.
The simplest improvement is a backup connection that fails in a different way from your main line. Fibre plus LTE or 5G is the classic pairing: a cut cable doesn't touch the mobile network, and a busy tower doesn't touch the fibre. For larger sites, a second fibre line from a different provider on a different route, or a fixed wireless link, adds further resilience.
A backup link only helps if traffic moves to it on its own. A business router or firewall — Fortinet, MikroTik or Ubiquiti, for example — monitors each link and switches over in seconds, then switches back when the main line recovers. Staff usually don't notice.
SD-WAN goes further than failover. It uses all your links at once and steers each application over the best path in real time: voice calls over the lowest-latency link, large downloads over the fattest pipe, and Microsoft 365 straight to the nearest Microsoft data centre. For businesses with branches, it replaces expensive private lines with secure, centrally managed connections.
Connectivity is only as good as the power behind it. Put your fibre terminal, router, firewall and core switch on a UPS sized for several hours, and consider a lithium battery system or inverter for longer outages. It's a small cost compared to a day without email or phones.
Our connectivity solutions combine fibre, wireless, LTE/5G failover and SD-WAN, designed around your sites and monitored by our team. Pair them with cloud PBX and cloud hosting so your business keeps running when one link doesn't.
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