Resource Guide
How to design and source backup internet connectivity — technology options, failover design, how to size the backup, and how to frame the cost against the cost of downtime.
Backup internet is the classic insurance decision — the need is obvious in retrospect, but easy to defer when nothing has gone wrong yet. Most businesses add backup connectivity after their first serious outage, once they have a concrete number for what an outage costs.
The practical argument for planning backup before an outage is straightforward: backup connectivity is most valuable when it is already in place and automatically active. An LTE backup that needs to be ordered and installed after an outage starts cannot help during that outage. A backup that is already running and tested can recover the business in seconds.
The core requirement of any backup internet design is that the backup operates on a physically separate network path from the primary. A backup that shares the same last-mile infrastructure as the primary — for example, a second circuit from the same carrier running over the same fibre in the ground — can fail for exactly the same reason as the primary.
The most common implementation of this principle is a wired primary circuit (fiber, cable, or dedicated) paired with a cellular LTE/5G backup from a different carrier. The two connections use completely different physical infrastructure — the primary runs over fibre or coax; the backup runs over the cellular radio network. A fibre cut or building equipment failure that takes down the primary cannot affect the cellular backup.
The test is whether a single physical failure — a fibre cut in the street, a power failure at a carrier facility, a building's telecom closet flooding — can take both connections down simultaneously. If the answer is yes, the backup does not provide meaningful protection against that failure mode.
The most common choice for business backup in Canada. Installation is fast — a cellular router can be deployed in hours rather than the weeks a wired installation requires. Modern LTE networks deliver 25–150 Mbps in most urban and suburban areas; 5G delivers more. The monthly cost is modest relative to a primary circuit and varies with data allocation and hardware.
The limitation of cellular backup is variability. Speeds vary with network load, and coverage in rural or remote areas is thinner than in urban markets. For locations where cellular reliability is uncertain, confirm signal quality before committing to it as a backup strategy.
Fixed wireless delivers connectivity via a directional antenna mounted on the building, pointed at a nearby tower. It is faster and more consistent than LTE in the locations where it is available, and operates on completely separate infrastructure from the wired network. The limitation is coverage — fixed wireless requires line-of-sight or near-line-of-sight to a tower and is available at far fewer addresses than LTE.
In locations where reliability requirements are very high, a second wired circuit from a different carrier — typically a cable circuit backing up a fiber primary, or vice versa — provides the most consistent performance. The trade-off is cost and installation time. A secondary wired circuit requires a carrier deployment, which can take weeks, and carries a full monthly circuit cost.
Satellite connectivity — including low-earth-orbit services — has improved significantly and now provides viable backup for locations where no other option is available. Latency is higher than wired or cellular options, which can affect real-time applications like VoIP and video conferencing. For remote locations without other options, satellite backup is far better than no backup.
The backup does not need to match the primary's full bandwidth. The sizing question is: what bandwidth does the business need to maintain essential operations during an outage?
For most businesses, essential operations during an outage means: cloud applications (ERP, CRM, email), VoIP phone calls, POS payment processing, and video calls for a subset of staff. The bandwidth requirement for these applications is a fraction of the full primary capacity.
A practical sizing approach: list the applications that must remain operational during an outage, estimate the bandwidth required for each at expected usage, and add a 50% buffer. For most small and mid-size businesses, this produces a backup bandwidth requirement in the range of 25–100 Mbps — well within what modern LTE can deliver.
Automatic failover — where a router detects a primary connection failure and switches to the backup without human intervention — is strongly preferred over manual switching. Manual switching requires someone to notice the outage, diagnose that it is a connectivity issue rather than a local problem, locate the right hardware, and make the switch — a process that can easily take 15–30 minutes or longer.
Automatic failover routers and SD-WAN devices monitor both connections continuously. When the primary drops, they detect the failure and route traffic to the backup within seconds. The business keeps running; staff may not notice the switch at all.
The additional cost of a router that supports automatic failover is modest relative to the cost of a 30-minute manual recovery. For any location where backup connectivity is being deployed, automatic failover should be the default configuration.
The monthly cost of a cellular backup circuit for a business location is modest. An automatic failover router, amortized over 3–5 years, adds a small additional monthly amount. The total is a fraction of what most businesses spend on primary connectivity.
The relevant comparison is: what does a 4-hour outage cost at your business? For a business where downtime means idle staff, lost transactions, or customer service failures, the answer is typically in the hundreds to thousands of dollars per hour. For a business like that, a modest monthly spend on backup connectivity pays for itself after the first major outage it prevents.
For businesses where internet connectivity is less operationally critical — where work can continue via mobile data and cloud tools without a dedicated backup — the calculation is different. The honest evaluation starts with a specific estimate of outage cost, not a general assumption.
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For how we design and source failover, see our backup internet and failover solution page.