Why we advise 5G failover alongside a fibre line

Fibre is reliable, until someone turns up with a digger. The question is not whether a line will ever fail, but what that costs at the moment it happens.

Do the maths first

For an office with flexible workers an hour without internet is inconvenient. For a distribution centre the process stops in that hour: no scanners, no orders, no outgoing loads. For a shop it means no card payments.

So we start with a calculation rather than an offer. What does an hour of downtime cost in revenue, wages and recovery work? At a few hundred euro, failover is hard to justify. At thousands, it is one of the cheapest measures you can take.

How automatic failover works

The router continuously checks whether the fixed line is working. If it drops, it switches to a 5G connection within seconds. Users usually notice only that a video call stutters briefly.

Three details matter: the failover has to be automatic (a manual switch is forgotten in a crisis), the 5G connection has to be tested periodically, and the bandwidth has to match what is really needed in an emergency. Not everything has to keep running, but tills, order processing and telephony do.

What we record for a failover setup

Without agreements, failover is a technical trick rather than a measure.

• Which systems have priority when bandwidth is limited.
• How long the organisation can keep working on 5G and what the data usage means.
• Who is alerted on a switchover, because a silent failover can go unnoticed for weeks.
• How often we test the failover, and what the test result should be.

Failover is not a backup

We say it often, because it is often confused: a second connection protects against the line failing, not against ransomware, data breaches or hardware faults. Continuity calls for several measures alongside each other, of which a tested backup is the most important.