Add LTE connectivity to your current Internet connection so failure to connect doesn’t mean failure to do business

IDC describes connectivity as the lifeblood of the organisation. In its recent analysis of connectivity trends, the research giant highlighted three key connectivity words – enable, accelerate, resilience. It is critical that companies invest in solutions that ensure connectivity redundancy and resiliency to mitigate the risks of service provider outages and to maintain connectivity across people, things, applications and processes. It is a view echoed by McKinsey in its analysis of ‘Resilience for sustainable, inclusive growth’ that allows for more flexibility, improved connections and reduced vulnerability. Failed connectivity, on the other hand, can cost the organisation a lot of money.

In 2021, the Facebook connectivity outage cost the company around $60 million in revenue and recent research found that poor connectivity is costing companies up to £19 billion a year. That’s a lot of money. It’s also not necessary. As Theo van Zyl,  Head of Wireless at Vox, fibre-to-the-business (FTTB) points out – with the right technology and investment, connectivity can become the most reliable part of an organisation’s infrastructure.

“The current landscape is unstable and uncertain with several key services working sporadically, if at all, and companies have little to no control over their access to these services or how well they work,” he says. “Sure, power is a guessing game, but there is absolutely no reason why this has to extend to connectivity. Not when there are solutions designed to provide organisations with the redundancy and failover they need. The power may go off, the water may stop running, but you’ve got the internet, your employees are still working and your customers are still getting exceptional service.”

With the cost of failed connectivity in mind, it’s easy to see why companies want redundancy and why they need failover and backup. Companies need solutions that will automatically switch over when there is a failure so that the network remains active and employees are not completely cut off from the internet. They also want failover solutions to provide the right bandwidth to allow for the smooth movement of information – throttled speeds and poor bandwidth are not optional in modern, digitally transformed environments.

“The risk of failure for the business is just too high,” says van Zyl. “There is absolutely no way that a company can afford to lose hours and days of connectivity. If fibre fails – and this does happen – then organisations are left floundering as productivity collapses and so does revenue. It also impacts critical business applications that have to remain connected to ensure the provision of essential services such as data storage, recovery and security.”

This brings the conversation round to the value of building connectivity foundations that ensure that the business is always on, always connected. Ensuring that there is always-on internet, that payment systems remain operational, and that there is business continuity. If fibre fails, these are the boxes that must remain ticked. They are also the reason why connectivity should be an inherent part of the business risk management strategy and failover should be built-in from the ground up.

“Think of it like this – you’re running a retail business and you’re managing and receiving payment transactions through the ERP system and fibre goes down,” says van Zyl. “Now return to service can take as long as four hours, so now the store is unable to process any transactions that are dependent on that connection. If the business turnover is R100k a day and they operate for eight hours a day, they’ve just lost R50k in revenue. This is an untenable risk.”

This example can be applied to any sector – from lawyers managing time-sensitive documentation through to warehousing to logistics and supply chain management to an office worker. Connectivity downtime is expensive and time-consuming. To mitigate this risk, there are some truly tasty technology solutions available on the market today. One is LTE failover – this is smart, automatic and fast, and can be customised to provide the organisation with the failover and redundancy service delivery required.

“LTE provides connectivity at the right speed and is a best effort redundancy service that comes in at a neat price point,” concludes van Zyl. “It’s cheaper than many other connectivity failover services on the market, and it is customisable so it has the ability to slot into circumstances efficiently and allows the organisation to migrate from one network to the other seamlessly, without disruption.”

While solutions like LTE are not as juicy as fibre, they are resilient and available. They offer organisations an immediate solution to a connectivity problem, and they provide cost-effective backup that kicks in when needed. You may not be able to control many of the issues facing the business today, but with the right technology, you can control the connectivity one.