One Comcast Outage Shouldn’t Close Your Business for a Day

The outage is not the problem. Having no plan B is the problem.

Every business owner I talk to in Palm Beach County has the same story. The internet went out, and everything stopped. Card reader down. Phones down, because the phones are internet phones now. Scheduling software down. Six people standing around looking at each other until somebody says the words I guess we could all just go home.

Then it comes back three hours later and everybody forgets about it until the next time.

Here is the thing. You cannot prevent an outage. Comcast is going to have a bad day, a backhoe is going to find a fiber line on Congress Ave, or a storm is going to take out a neighborhood. What you can control is whether that costs you an hour or costs you the whole day.

First, figure out what actually has to stay up

Not everything is critical. Be honest about the short list. For most small shops it comes down to four things:

Taking money. Card processing, invoicing, whatever gets a customer to pay you today.
Answering the phone. A missed call in a service business is a lost job, and it goes to whoever picks up next.
Your calendar and your client records. If you cannot see who is coming in at 2pm, the day falls apart.
Email. Not because it is urgent, but because silence looks like you went out of business.

Everything else can wait until the connection comes back. Write that list down. It is the whole basis of your plan, and it usually fits on an index card.

The cheap failover that solves 90 percent of this

A backup internet connection used to be an expensive thing that only banks bothered with. Not anymore. A cellular failover setup runs somewhere around 30 to 60 dollars a month, and it works like this: you put in a router that can hold two internet connections at once, your regular cable line plus a 5G modem with a data plan. When the cable line drops, traffic moves over to cellular automatically. Most people in the office notice a brief hiccup and nothing else.

A few things that make the difference between this working and this being decoration:

Use a different carrier than your main line. If your fiber and your backup both ride the same infrastructure, one storm takes out both.
Size the data plan for a bad day, not a typical day. Turn off cloud backups and big file syncs while you are on the backup link so a four hour outage does not eat a month of data.
Put the antenna where the signal is. Inside a metal roofed warehouse, a 5G modem sitting under a desk is a paperweight. It needs to see outside.

The mistake almost everybody makes with battery backup

Plenty of offices have a UPS. It is usually plugged into the computer at the front desk, and that is it.

Think about what that gets you. The power blinks, the desktop stays on, and the modem, the router, the switch, and the wireless access points all die instantly. So the machine is running and it cannot reach anything. Congratulations on your very expensive clock.

Network gear draws almost no power. A modest UPS will run a modem, router, and switch for a couple of hours on battery. That is the single highest value hundred and fifty dollars in your whole office, because it turns a five second flicker into a non event and it keeps your cameras and your door system alive through the small outages that happen constantly down here in the summer.

Your phones need their own answer

If you moved to VoIP, and most people have, your phone system is just another thing that lives on the internet. Good news is that every serious VoIP provider has a failover setting buried in the admin panel. It usually says something like if the device is unreachable, forward to this number.

Set it to a cell phone. Test it by unplugging the office phone and calling your main line. If you have never tested it, assume it does not work, because in my experience about half the time it is either unset or pointing at a number that belonged to somebody who left two years ago.

Have an offline mode for taking money

Ask your payment processor two questions. Can the terminal run on cellular, and does it have an offline mode that stores transactions until it reconnects. Most modern terminals do both, and most owners have never turned either on.

Backup plan that costs nothing: a spare terminal that runs on its own cell connection, or the ability to key a payment into a phone app. Paper and a promise to charge them later is not a plan, it is a collections problem you are creating for yourself.

Now test it, because an untested plan is a guess

This is the part everybody skips, and it is the only part that proves anything. Pick a slow Tuesday afternoon. Walk over to the rack and unplug the cable coming in from the street. Then time it.

How long until the backup connection picks up?
Does the card reader still work?
Does a call to your main number reach a human?
Does anybody in the building know what is happening, or does the whole office file a ticket at once?

Whatever breaks during that test would have broken during a real outage, except you found it on your terms with nobody waiting on you. Do it twice a year. Do one of them before June, because hurricane season does not care about your maintenance window.

What this is worth

Run the math for your own shop. Take a normal day of revenue, divide by eight hours, and that is roughly what an hour of being fully down costs you. For a lot of the businesses we work with between Delray and West Palm, one dead afternoon costs more than a year of the backup connection.

You are not buying uptime for its own sake. You are buying the ability to keep taking orders on the day your competitor down the street has a sign taped to the door.

If you want somebody to look at what happens to your office when the line drops, that is a straightforward visit and we do it all over Palm Beach County. Always happy to troubleshoot.